Jumping Jiminy--it's a robot

Johns Hopkins engineering students and their professor spent more than 8 months studying the hopping and landing skills of spider crickets, the kind often found in basements.

Emily Palmer and...muse.

They are not just cricket lovers--but robot builders--and they want one that can jump around.

The researchers think non-human creatures are the best models.

So they trained high-speed video cameras on the insects to find out how the wingless bugs can leap 60 times their body length. A human--to do this--would have to jump the length of a football field.

The crickets use their limbs (legs and antennae) to stabilize them.  They saw--in slow motion--that this process was sort of like a dance. Beautiful and intricate. On the way "up," they pulled in their limbs to counter air resistance.

We have robots that crawl into small spaces, drones that sail overhead, creepy humanoid ones that lift old people into bed...so why not little jumpy ones?

Check out the video: http://youtu.be/Ua6wauucdOo