Leaping Springtails
Super tiny and super fast
This tiny animal, roughly the size of a grain of rice, can jump hundreds of times its body length in under a second, and look graceful doing it.
Springtails (Collembola) are the largest group of non-insect hexapods. They are well known for their impressive leaps off a myriad of different substrates. However, we know surprisingly little about the mechanisms and behaviors behind their ultrafast jumps.
It was assumed that these tiny jumpers couldn’t control their high-speed leaps or landings, but our research shows they can control every aspect of their jumps— from the directional take-offs to aerial righting, and even stabilized landings. These tiny jumpers offer novel insights into biological ultrafast movements and bio-inspired design of robotic jumpers.
This project has been featured in the New York Times, Smithsonian magazine, and more.
Major questions
1) How can springtails jump so well?
2) How do springtails control their take-off and landing at such high accelerations?
3) How can we apply these insights into ultrafast, robotic jumpers?
What we’ve discovered
Read the papers
Passive Aerial Righting and Safe Landing of a Small Bio-inspired Jumping Robot. IEEE (2024).
Directional takeoff, aerial righting, and adhesion landing of semiaquatic springtails. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022).
Air-to-land Transitions: From wingless animals and plant seeds to shuttlecocks and bioinspired robots. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics (2023).