Meeting Abstract
Latch mediated, spring actuated (LaMSA) systems occur in nature as a way to drastically amplify the kinematic performance of a mechanical system. LaMSA systems exhibit remarkable diversity in mechanisms and materials, which makes it challenging to generalize insights about the underlying mechanics. We present developments to a mathematical and computational “toy model” of latch-spring systems based in Newtonian mechanics that allows us to assess system performance for arbitrary latch geometry and unlatching kinematics. We also expand our model to include a lever arm with some mechanical advantage, a feature found in many biomechanical systems. In particular, we use our model to identify couplings between the latch, spring, and lever that give rise to optima in performance metrics. We find that these optima are created by couplings related to the loading of the spring, size scaling, and non-ideal properties of the spring and lever. We can then use these couplings to form hypotheses about trade-offs observed in nature. As a proof of concept, we deploy our model in the context of trap-jaw ant morphology and materials properties from the literature. Using our model, we identify a four-dimensional normalized parameter space and explore the utility of the model to raise interesting questions about the comparative placement and performance of different species in this space.
