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from the keep-going-and-going-and-going dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Anyone who's tried to kill a cockroach knows that the ancient pests have some world-class evasive maneuvers. Or at least they appear to.
The agility of cockroaches may owe less to lightning-fast reflexes and fancy footwork than their tough, shock-absorbent bodies. According to a new study, American cockroaches can run full-speed into walls and other obstacles because their exoskeletons allow them to recover quickly with hardly any loss in momentum.
"Their bodies are doing the computing, not their brains or complex sensors," said Kaushik Jayaram, a biologist at Harvard University and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The findings -which were further validated by a tiny, cockroach-sized robot - could influence the design of the next generation of robots that run, jump and fly.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 15 2018, @09:17AM (1 child)
Well, depends on what you want. If you are happy with just the car surviving, the strategy may indeed work. If you also want anything in the way of the car to survive, you probably want to employ a more sophisticated control.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15 2018, @07:44PM
I want you to try the cockroach method in your car and let your car body do the computing.