Climbing favours the tripod gait over alternative faster insect gaits
Abstract
To escape danger or catch prey, running vertebrates rely on dynamic gaits with minimal ground contact. By contrast, most insects use a tripod gait that maintains at least three legs on the ground at any given time. One prevailing hypothesis for this difference in fast locomotor strategies is that tripod locomotion allows insects to rapidly navigate three-dimensional terrain. To test this, we computationally discovered fast locomotor gaits for a model based on Drosophila melanogaster. Indeed, the tripod gait emerges to the exclusion of many other possible gaits when optimizing fast upward climbing with leg adhesion. By contrast, novel two-legged bipod gaits are fastest on flat terrain without adhesion in the model and in a hexapod robot. Intriguingly, when adhesive leg structures in real Drosophila are covered, animals exhibit atypical bipod-like leg coordination. We propose that the requirement to climb vertical terrain may drive the prevalence of the tripod gait over faster alternative gaits with minimal ground contact.
Additional Information
© 2017 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Received: 23 July 2016. Accepted: 04 January 2017. Published online: 17 February 2017. We thank Robert J. Full, Silvia Gruhn, Philip Holmes and members of the Floreano laboratory for helpful comments on an early version of the manuscript. P.R. was supported by a Human Frontier Science Program Long-term Fellowship (LT000057/2009) and a Swiss National Science Foundation Advanced.Postdoc Mobility grant (P300P3_158511). R.T. was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (CR2312_140714). R.B. acknowledges support from European Research Council Starting Independent Researcher and Consolidator Grants (205202 and 615094), and the Swiss National Science Foundation (31003A_140869). A.I. and D.F. acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the National Center for Competence in Robotics (NCCR). Pavan Ramdya & Robin Thandiackal: These authors contributed equally to this work. Author Contributions: P.R. conceived the project. P.R., R.T., R.C. and T.A. carried out experiments and analysis with input from R.B., A.J.I. and D.F. P.R. wrote the paper with input from all co-authors. The authors declare no competing financial interests. Data availability: Gait data are provided in Supplementary Data. The remaining Webots, robotics and D. melanogaster data sets and code are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.Attached Files
Published - ncomms14494.pdf
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s1.pdf
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s2.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s3.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s4.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s5.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s6.mov
Supplemental Material - ncomms14494-s7.xlsx
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC5321742
- Eprint ID
- 75203
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170317-110914438
- LT000057/2009
- Human Frontier Science Program
- P300P3_158511
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- CR2312_140714
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- 205202
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 615094
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 31003A_140869
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- National Center for Competence in Robotics (Switzerland)
- Created
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2017-03-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field