Why Animals Can Outrun Robots

An interdisciplinary team, including Drs. Sam Burden, Tom Libby, Kaushik Jayaram, and Simon Sponberg, studied the performance of running robots by comparing them to biological systems. Their findings, published in Science Robotics, revealed that while individual robotic components often perform better than their biological counterparts, animals surpass robots in integrating these components for efficient movement.

"The way things turned out is that, with only minor exceptions, the engineering subsystems outperform the biological equivalents - and sometimes radically outperformed them. But also what's very, very clear is that, if you compare animals to robots at the whole system level, in terms of movement, animals are amazing. And robots have yet to catch up," noted Libby. However, Burden pointed out the potential for rapid progress in robotics, contrasting it with the slow pace of natural evolution. He emphasized the ability to iteratively improve robotic designs, a capability that biological evolution lacks: "It will move faster, because evolution is undirected. Whereas we can very much correct how we design robots and learn something in one robot and download it into every other robot, biology doesn't have that option. So there are ways that we can move much more quickly when we engineer robots than we can through evolution - but evolution has a massive head start."

Research Report:The study not only sheds light on current limitations but also suggests directions for future robotic enhancements, focusing on better integration and control of existing technologies. As Donelan states, "As engineering learns integration principles from biology, running robots will become as efficient, agile, and robust as their biological counterparts."