(PhysOrg.com) -- University of California, Berkeley, biologists
and engineers including undergraduate and graduate students
studied how lizards manage to leap successfully even when they
slip and stumble, and found that swinging the tail upward is the
key to preventing a forward pitch that could send them head-
over-heels into a tree. The scientists subsequently added a tail
to a robotic car they named Tailbot and discovered that it's not
as simple as throwing your tail in the air. Robots and lizards
have to adjust the angle of their tail just right to counteract
the effect of the stumble. Given an actively controlled tail,
even robots can make a leap and remain upright. "We showed for
the first time that lizards swing their tail up or down to
counteract the rotation of their body, keeping them stable,"
said team leader Robert J. Full, UC Berkeley professor of
integrative biology. "Inspiration from lizard tails will likely
lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones
having greater capabili