Meeting Abstract
While many studies have investigated gecko adhesive locomotion, most studies investigate gecko locomotor performance while geckos are traveling upwards on an inclined or vertical substrate. Recent studies have suggested that geckos modulate the position of their hind limbs while descending an angled substrate, and that this modulation does not appear to affect sprint velocity on substrate declines up to 45°. While there appears to be no performance decrement at relatively shallow substrate angles, it is unclear whether more challenging substrate angles would lead to different results. Given the directionality of the gecko adhesive system, traveling downward on a vertical substrate should be more difficult than traveling upward on the same vertical substrate. To test this, we studied the locomotion of eight Gekko gecko sprinting upward or downward on a 2-meter vertical, acrylic racetrack, oriented at both 60° or 90°. A motion capture system was used to record the position of each gecko in 3-dimensional space as a function of time. This time and position data was used to calculate: average and maximum velocity, ratio of time stopped to time moving, stride frequency, and stride length of each gecko per treatment. Here we present our preliminary data and discuss the implications for the adhesive locomotion of free-ranging geckos, as well as implementation of gecko-inspired synthetic adhesives into biomimetic robots.
