The Velociraptor-Like Robot that could save your life

Summary of the article written by Valerie Ross, from “Discover Magazine”

The Biologist Robert Full use several animals within his lab at the University of California, like crabs, crawling centipedes, etc, as inspiration to built together with his collages, a fast, steady and agile robot, able to navigate through the rubble following an earthquake or other disaster.

The idea came from observing an African lizard with a great ability of landing after vaulting through the air and very stable. Then he thought about applying the same technique with a Robot.

While Full and his team, study about lizards, it lead Full to search about paleontology, and he found out that a predatory dinosaur named velociraptor, used a similar body-stabilizing trick as the African lizard, and after analyzing such creature, he discovered that the raptors were probably as good as the lizards at staying upright by using their tails.

Now Full is able to assess the motion of the computer-generated raptors in the film Jurassic Park even though his theory cannot be confirmed yet.