Spider leaps on demand as scientists develop robot arachnid army
SPIDERS are notorious for making people jump. But scientists at the University of Manchester turned the tables, training a jumping spider to leap on command.
After several failed attempts with other spiders, star pupil Kim finally began to spring from one ledge to another, allowing scientists to record, monitor and analyse a spider’s movements in high-resolution 3D for the first time. The aim was to understand how jumping spiders modify their speed and trajectory over varying distances or when leaping upwards.
A jumping spider can leap up to six times its body length from a standing start. The best a human can achieve is about 1.5 body lengths. Researchers were anxious not to skew the spider’s behaviour by tempting it to the other platform with food.
Instead, over several weeks they placed Kim backwards and forwards between the ledges until it finally got the idea of jumping between them. The footage will be used to help engineers create an army of agile micro-robots capable of hunting pests, so that farmers can avoid toxic pesticides.
Dr Mostafa Nabawy, the study’s lead author, said: “We could have used a cricket to tempt her ... but we could only have done that once a week because spiders don’t eat that often, and we wanted to film different kinds of jumps. There is a huge interest in developing jumping robots, but so far research has focused on long distances. This research could allow robots to be created that jump shorter distances but are more accurate when they land.
“It could allow the development of robot spiders which are capable of hunting pests, so instead of using pesticides you could have an army of robotic spiders capable of targeting bugs.”
Researchers found that to jump shorter distances Kim favoured a faster, lower trajectory which used up more energy, but made it more accurate. Over longer distances, or to an elevated platform, it jumped in the most efficient way to reduce energy used. The study is being published in Nature Scientific Reports.
Scientists in Manchester have trained a spider to jump on command. This is the first step in an ambition to master the arachnid reflexes in order to program an army of agile micro-robots capable of hunting pests, so that farmers need no longer use poisonous pesticides. It is a benevolent plan, and yet there us something about it that sounds like the beginning of a science-fiction story with a very unpleasant plot. The fantasy writer would have the spider-robots run wild, with their own autonomous motives. They would develop a taste for something other than pests – honey-bees, at best; at worst, sleeping human beings. In reality, scientific invention is not bound to follow a sinister John Wyndham path. The very awareness of dark imaginings should ensure that spiders, natural or simulated, only jump when they’re asked to.