Nature Tech_1of3_Magic of Motion
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00:00The Earth has been a living planet for nearly 4 billion years.
00:15In that time, nature has had to solve all the varied problems of life, finding food,
00:21finding mates, moving around, and surviving in extremes.
00:32From the highest of mountaintops to the freezing ocean waters.
00:48In the beginning, people were just another part of this breathtaking diversity.
00:53But our large brains began to set us apart from the natural world, as we used technology
01:00to solve the problems of life.
01:10This alienation made us extremely successful, but at great cost to our planet.
01:28Now we're beginning to see nature with new eyes.
01:36At the start of the third millennium, we stand on the brink of a new revolution.
01:41One where nature and technology stand hand in hand.
01:48The new science of biomimetics looks to nature for inspiration, and is finding answers to
01:54our modern problems in totally unexpected ways.
01:58From how to move around, to new materials, and new ways of building them, and even how
02:05to solve the energy crisis.
02:09The answers are already out there, in nature.
02:13All we need is for nature and technology to work together.
02:36Nature has solved the problem of moving around in some wonderful ways.
02:46Legs, wings, and fins have all been invented by evolution many times.
03:00But all these creatures have one thing in common.
03:06They have to travel as economically as possible.
03:10Nature abhors waste.
03:13No creature that wastes energy will survive the unforgiving hand of natural selection.
03:21So we must be able to improve our own technology by looking at walking, swimming, and flying.
03:52But can scientists really learn anything new from nature?
03:59After all, we've come up with incredibly successful ways to travel around our planet.
04:04We can move faster than anything in nature.
04:11We can find our way with unerring accuracy.
04:15We can even build flying machines much bigger than anything nature could ever dream of.
04:25The biggest thing nature can get into the air is this swan.
04:30But it was birds that first gave humans the idea of flying.
04:38Dreaming of flight and actually taking to the air are two very different things.
04:43And despite imaginative ideas like those of Leonardo da Vinci, people would remain firmly earthbound for centuries.
05:00Then, around a hundred years ago, the dream finally took off.
05:14Pioneers like German engineer Otto Lilienthal began to find ways of getting off the ground.
05:21Like Leonardo, he made detailed studies of birds.
05:26He reasoned that the shape and structure of the wings was vital to the bird's ability to fly,
05:31so he modeled his designs along similar principles.
05:36This was the right approach, though it would be many more years before anyone understood why his designs worked.
05:44The shape of birds' wings creates a spinning mass of air, a vortex, around the wing.
05:51When the bird is moving forward, this circulation causes the air above the wing to move faster than the air below.
05:58The faster air moves, the lower its pressure.
06:01So this means that the air below the wing is at a higher pressure than the air above, creating an upward force.
06:09Lift. The key to taking to the air.
06:18Of course, birds are much more complicated than that.
06:23They also flap their wings to produce forward thrust.
06:28A bird's wing is both wing and engine.
06:39Lilienthal's real bio-inspired breakthrough was to separate the problems of lift and thrust.
06:47He thought the only way to conquer the air was first to master gliding.
06:54Which he did with incredible success.
07:00In all, he made 2,000 flights.
07:11His pioneering flights laid the foundations for the next stage in aviation,
07:16a step taken in America by the Wright brothers.
07:21These two bicycle makers from Ohio made the first ever powered flight.
07:27But this first Wright flyer was almost impossible to control.
07:33This historic moment wasn't exactly a display of precision flying.
07:38The Wright brothers still had to work out how to steer their plane,
07:43a problem nature solved a long time ago.
07:51The Goshawk has perfected the art of aerobatics.
07:55It hunts its prey through dense forests, so needs to twist and turn at high speed.
08:01It's impossible to appreciate its performance in the wild,
08:05but slowed down a hundred times, its aerial skill is breathtaking.
08:11And birds also gave the Wright brothers their breakthrough.
08:15They didn't have the technology to look at the sky.
08:18They had to fly in the sky.
08:21But the Wright brothers were the first to do it.
08:25They had the technology to look at the sky.
08:28The Goshawk was the first to do it.
08:31It was a great success.
08:35And birds also gave the Wright brothers their breakthrough.
08:39They didn't have the technology to look at how a Goshawk manoeuvred in flight.
08:47But all they had to do to find inspiration was to look up.
08:53Turkey vultures were a common sight around their home in Ohio.
09:05And these birds fly with a slow, lazy, gliding flight
09:10as they circle over the ground searching for carrion.
09:13It's much easier to see with the naked eye how they control their flight path.
09:21They seem to steer by twisting their wings.
09:25And the Wright brothers took this idea and applied it to their later planes.
09:32It worked so well that the Wright brothers were able to join the vultures,
09:37soaring over the prairies for hours at a time.
09:49So aviation may have only got off the ground through inspiration from nature.
09:54But over the next century, aviation engineers went their own way
09:59and ignored nature's designs.
10:08But many of our cleverest engineering solutions have exact counterparts in nature.
10:14For birds and planes, the hardest part of flying is landing or taking off.
10:20When a wing is moving slowly through the air, there's much less lift,
10:25making it harder to stay in the air.
10:31The engineering solution is to make the wing bigger by extending flaps at the rear.
10:48And nature does the same.
10:52A hunting barn owl flies slowly,
10:55listening for the slightest noise in the grass that might reveal the location of a mouse.
11:08In slow flight, its feathers are spread out to give it maximum lift.
11:13A bird can change the shape of its wing far more dramatically than a plane,
11:18giving the barn owl its ability to hang in the air until it pinpoints its target.
11:40These striking parallels between nature and technology meant that
11:44during the whole century of aviation, engineers spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel,
11:50or at least the wing.
11:53Now, with the birth of this new way of thinking, of bio-inspired thinking,
11:58engineers are looking to nature when designing the next generation of aircraft.
12:06These robo-gulls at Florida State University are radio-controlled models,
12:12with wings that behave more like those of birds.
12:16These planes can change the way they fly, just like birds,
12:20making them much more adaptable than conventional planes.
12:24This one changes the area of its wings, in the same way as a bird does,
12:28by sliding its feathers apart.
12:31Birds can also alter the angle of their wrist joints to change their flight characteristics.
12:37And so can this plane.
12:40With its wings in the wrist-down position, the plane is less stable but very manoeuvrable.
12:46With its wings straight, the plane glides well,
12:49and with the wrists up, it's more controllable and easy to land.
12:57This plane is steered by wing warping,
13:01a system abandoned by engineers shortly after the Wright brothers,
13:05because, although very efficient, it needs constant adjustments and instantaneous reactions.
13:12All these planes fly, but because they behave like birds, they're very difficult to control.
13:18Evolution has turned the bird's brain into an ultra-fast control system,
13:23an on-board computer capable of making continuous, lightning-fast adjustments to wing shape and angle.
13:31Just how fast a goshawk's reactions need to be,
13:34can only be seen when its dash through the trees is filmed from an on-board camera.
13:39The researchers from Florida State University really appreciated the goshawk's instinctive skill
14:03when they tried flying their robo-gulls by remote control.
14:08It took a lot of practice to keep these things in the air,
14:12but once mastered, these little planes are highly manoeuvrable.
14:38Meanwhile, at the Technical University of Berlin,
14:42scientists are using a specially designed wind tunnel to study a different aspect of bird flight.
14:51Attached to the front of this wind tunnel is another innovative design by Natural Selection,
14:57a stork's wing.
14:59The long, finger-like primary feathers are spread and turned upwards in flight.
15:04This reduces the amount of drag, which would otherwise slow the bird down.
15:09For birds like storks and vultures, a wing with low drag is critical.
15:14It gives them a much better performance as gliders.
15:18We've invented a similar trick.
15:21Upturned winglets on the end of the wings of modern aircraft serve the same purpose,
15:26reducing drag created by vortices spinning off the wing tips.
15:31But nature's system is more adaptable. It's automatic.
15:35As the airflow increases over the wing, the primaries bend up into just the right position,
15:42and multiple winglets are more effective.
15:50Using a series of models of a stork's wing,
15:53the scientists here worked out the best arrangement of multiple winglets.
15:58Then they went a step further than nature.
16:01They took away the individual feathers, just leaving a loop at the end of the wing.
16:10By extending this idea even further, the scientists made this model,
16:15where the whole wing is a loop, allowing the plane to fly at walking speed.
16:21The real joy of bio-engineering is in the fact that
16:26The real joy of bio-inspired thinking is not always in the obvious,
16:31but in the leap to new and unexpected ideas.
16:36By understanding the way a stork's primaries work,
16:39these scientists have designed a way to make more efficient wind turbines.
16:44Based on the design of the stork's wing feathers, they arranged veins in a circle.
16:49As they shed their vortices into the centre, the veins increase the airflow here.
16:55So when a windmill is pulled back into the centre of this structure, it picks up speed.
17:08Inspiration for new ideas can come from anywhere.
17:12There are more than enough ideas just around the house and garden
17:15to keep a scientist busy for a whole career.
17:19Take the humble fly, for example.
17:22It might hold the secrets to new kinds of spy vehicles, or search and rescue equipment.
17:37To most of us, it's just a germ-carrying nuisance.
17:44But look again.
17:47It can do things no engineer can.
18:21Let alone how to copy them.
18:23But now the fly's secrets are being unravelled,
18:26and it needed a whole new branch of aerodynamics to understand it.
18:36Deep in the basement of Caltech, the California Institute of Technology,
18:41there's a fruit fly with a half-metre wingspan, a working model,
18:46submerged in hundreds of litres of oil.
18:49The oil behaves like air would over the tiny real fly.
18:54Injecting air bubbles into the oil shows the scientists what happens as the insect flaps its wings.
19:00An exact replica of the real thing, but at a scale which makes it easier to study.
19:12The wing creates spinning masses of air around it.
19:16Some of these vortices spin off beneath the wing, producing some lift.
19:33But the scientists noticed that one vortex stays attached, just behind the front edge of the wing.
19:47And it turns out that this leading-edge vortex is vitally important in allowing the fly to fly.
19:54This is what generates most of the lift.
20:06Understanding how insects fly should mean we can build smaller and smaller flying machines.
20:17But so far, machines like Delfly, at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, is about as small as we can get.
20:29Delfly doesn't, at first sight, look like any insect that ever lived.
20:34Its two pairs of wings are stacked one on top of the other, not one in front of the other like an insect.
20:41But the inspiration behind Delfly came from watching the aerial skills of dragonflies.
20:50And it uses the same tricks as insects to fly.
20:58Most of its lift comes from a leading-edge vortex that forms over its wings, just as in a real insect.
21:10Flapping flight was abandoned by aviators before it ever got off the ground.
21:15But now, understanding how insects fly, we can build flapping flyers that really fly.
21:24And not just fly.
21:26In flight, Delfly looks very much like a giant dragonfly.
21:32And like the real thing, it can hover.
21:41Delfly also carries a tiny on-board camera.
21:44And its slow, manoeuvrable flight would make it the perfect reconnaissance machine for confined spaces.
21:56Though it's still not as good as the real thing.
21:59But as a designer, nature does have one big disadvantage over humans.
22:04It can't start from the drawing board each time.
22:07It has to work with what it's got.
22:10The ancestors of penguins flew through the air, whilst today they fly through water.
22:17Nature had to take a design adapted for one thing and make it do something else.
22:22That penguins can move through the water so easily shows just how effective natural selection is.
22:29So penguins might be the obvious creatures to study for designing better ships and submarines.
22:35Perhaps.
22:37But at its best, biomimetics is never that obvious.
22:41When it comes to underwater energy efficiency, it's much better to take a close look at sharks.
22:47They seem to use far less energy than they should.
22:51And to find out why means taking a very close look.
22:58Magnified hundreds of times, shark skin is covered in tiny scales, each with a ridge along its centre.
23:06These ridges trap a layer of water close to the skin, which reduces friction as the shark moves through the ocean.
23:13One swimsuit manufacturer has now made suits covered in minute shark skin-like ridges.
23:29Then, they analyse the shape of a swimmer's body and, just as the shark does, only place ridges where they're most effective.
23:39This should, in theory, reduce drag by around 4%.
23:43That's not much, but in competition against the best in the world, it might just be enough.
23:54At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Australian swimmers wore these new suits for the first time and kept ahead of the field.
24:09Whether it was the shark skin effect or good old-fashioned better training is hard to say.
24:23But they might just owe this gold medal to one of the ocean's most efficient predators.
24:30At first sight, the dumpy little boxfish looks to be the complete opposite of the sleek, streamlined shark.
24:37But it attracted the attention of car designers at Daimler-Chrysler in Germany.
24:45When they studied it more closely in wind tunnels and computer simulations, they found that it was very effectively swimming.
24:54And because, like a car, it's shaped like a box, they modelled a car based on the boxfish.
25:05When they tested their new boxfish car in a wind tunnel, they found it had 65% less drag than the average family car.
25:15But, as a result, the boxfish had a much smaller body.
25:23As efficient as nature is, it's never come up with one innovation that we have.
25:30The wheel.
25:39Wheels are very energy-efficient ways to move around.
25:42But the problem with wheels is that, as the ground gets rougher and rougher, wheels get less and less effective.
25:50Nature's solution, on the other hand, has no such problems.
25:57Legs. And what insects can do with six of them is truly remarkable.
26:04For one thing, the whole system operates on minimal computational power.
26:11An insect's brain just tells it when to stop or start, and perhaps how fast to walk.
26:17But all the complex coordination is done by simpler control units in the legs themselves.
26:23A system which turns out to be incredibly adaptable.
26:27With just a small change in its control system, this stick insect switches from walking to searching for a new foothold.
26:35And then crossing a gap that would stop most robots in their tracks.
26:48So at Bielefeld University in Germany, stick insects are put through their paces to see how this system works.
26:57Researchers here have found that the stick insect has separate controllers.
27:02Not just for each leg, but for each joint of its legs.
27:07These work with sensors in the legs which fine-tune what amounts to an automated walking system.
27:17Exactly what some robot designers are trying to achieve.
27:28Tari 2 was built to mimic a stick insect.
27:32Each individual leg control unit can be programmed in different ways to test assumptions about how stick insects walk.
27:39The more Tari 2 walks like a stick insect, the closer these scientists are to understanding how the real insect walks.
27:47Information which could then be used to make walking robots with insect-like economy.
28:03But insects can do more than just walk.
28:06They can run.
28:07At very high speed.
28:19This roach can cover 50 body lengths in a second, which is why we only ever catch a glimpse of them.
28:26But slowed down more than a hundred times, this unloved pest becomes a source of inspiration.
28:31At the University of California in Berkeley, scientists are looking at just how fast different kinds of cockroaches can run.
28:46As this death's head roach runs, it turns an air-cushioned ball, allowing a computer to measure its performance.
29:02And persuading it to run on a treadmill, the scientists can film it in ultra-slow motion, to see in detail how its legs work.
29:14The legs act like miniature pistons, ramming into the ground.
29:19And the scientists found that the roach's legs are not stiff, like a robot's legs.
29:24A certain amount of give seems to make a running roach more stable.
29:32Likewise, their sprawling gait seems to be another reason why we don't often see roaches fall over, even when running at high speed.
29:43Putting these insights together, scientists at Stanford University in California came up with Sprawleter.
29:51Its legs are pistons that mimic the way a roach's legs push against the ground.
29:57And its legs both give and sprawl like a real roach.
30:01And this cockroach-inspired design does give it a reasonable turn of speed.
30:07This robot can cover three body lengths a second.
30:10This prototype is programmed and driven by a large control unit, attached by cables to the robot.
30:17But, inspired by the success of the basic design, and by the control systems of insects, Sprawleter evolved into iSprawl, a remote-controlled version.
30:32And with a few further improvements in leg design, iSprawl can cover 15 body lengths a second in a surprisingly roach-like manner.
30:42Though not yet close to the fastest roaches.
30:46But roaches aren't the only creatures providing inspiration for robot designers.
30:54If anything, ghost crabs are even more impressive performers.
30:58They can also run at speed, but on eight legs, not six.
31:03And they can switch from running forwards, to sideways, to backwards, without ever breaking stride.
31:14Back in the lab, the ghost crab's running skills can be studied in more detail.
31:22They're also the perfect all-terrain vehicles.
31:26In this experiment, air bubbled through the sand turns it into the equivalent of quicksand.
31:34It slows the crab down.
31:37But a change in its gait, the crab's version of low gear ratio four-wheel drive, means it can easily cross this obstacle.
31:46And back on the treadmill, the scientists can also measure how much energy the crabs are using to move.
31:54And some very unexpected results are beginning to emerge.
32:01As they measured more and more species with different numbers of legs,
32:05they found similar relationships between the energy used and the forces that these creatures generate when walking.
32:12Between animals as different as humans, crabs, and dogs.
32:19One human leg is the same as two dog legs, or three roach legs, or four crab legs.
32:28An underlying principle of walking seems to be emerging.
32:32And this holds all the way up to a millipede with 180 legs.
32:37Understanding the basic principles behind nature's designs is the key to successful bio-inspired thinking.
32:44And millipedes, crabs, and roaches seem to be leading to totally new robot designs.
32:56Nature's walking machines rarely break down.
32:59And that's because nature goes in for a lot of redundancy. There's always a backup system.
33:09Creatures like millipedes and centipedes dramatically illustrate this principle.
33:14They have multiple repeated segments, each doing the same thing.
33:19A great many of these segments would have to be damaged to stop this 10-centimeter giant centipede
33:24from moving at speed over the forest floor.
33:27And its long, thin body allows it to squeeze through narrow gaps in pursuit of prey.
33:35Millipedes, crabs, and roaches seem to be leading to totally new robot designs.
33:40And that's because nature goes in for a lot of redundancy.
33:43A long, thin body allows it to squeeze through narrow gaps in pursuit of prey.
33:52At Penn State University in Philadelphia, this segmented robot works on just that principle.
33:59When it wants to move quickly, it can roll into a wheel.
34:03But then it unfurls to move like a mechanical caterpillar through narrow gaps.
34:14And it will take the loss of several of its segments to bring it to a halt.
34:23Giving a robot segments means it can behave even more like a centipede,
34:28making use of serpentine movements to move at high speed.
34:34The wheels on this robot are not powered.
34:38They merely allow the robot to glide over the floor, driven by its centipede-like undulations.
34:46But it's also possible to have the best of both worlds, of technology and nature,
34:52by combining wheels and legs.
34:57These robots do just that. Hence their name, WEGs.
35:02This is, in essence, a cockroach on wheels.
35:07Wheeled legs give these robots the advantage of wheels,
35:11but with the roaches' ability to negotiate obstacles.
35:16But roaches are still much better at covering rough ground, even at top speed.
35:22It only takes a slight change to their control system to allow them to do this,
35:26something that attracts as much envy as admiration from robot designers.
35:32And something else roaches do without breaking stride is climb up vertical surfaces.
35:42They do this by using tiny claws on their feet,
35:46which hook into any irregularities on the surface.
35:50How they attach and release these hooks is not known.
35:54Attach and release these hooks is the secret to their success,
35:58a secret that has been unraveled by scientists at Stanford University.
36:11They've produced SpinyBot, a robot that can climb vertical surfaces,
36:17using cockroach-like claws and an ingenious mechanism for hooking into the tiniest of cracks.
36:24But some insects can go where even roaches fear to tread.
36:54Flies have little trouble in climbing up smooth surfaces like glass,
36:59where a roach's claws would have nothing to hook into.
37:04A trick that's down to the fine details of the fly's foot.
37:11Magnified more than a thousand times, a fly's foot is covered in huge numbers of tiny hairs,
37:18each of which ends in a flattened plate.
37:20The fly oozes an oily liquid into the hairs,
37:24which sticks each of those thousands of plates onto the glass by a process called liquid adhesion.
37:35The same thing that causes a beer mat to stick to a wet glass.
37:39Robot designers have looked at flies, but concluded that robots that leave oily footprints wouldn't be a good idea,
37:46especially when there are bigger creatures that can climb smooth surfaces that might be easier to mimic, like tree frogs.
37:56The frog's feet are covered in mucus, but they don't seem to work in quite the same way that a fly's foot does.
38:04Because the frog is so much bigger, the mucus on its toes would have to be thicker to stick it to the glass,
38:11and then it couldn't unstick its feet.
38:13After all, climbing is as much about letting go as hanging on.
38:20When scientists looked closely at this mucus, they were surprised to find that it's not much thicker than water.
38:27Easy for the frog to lift its feet, but not sticky enough for it to hang on.
38:37The answer to this mystery lies in the fine detail of the frog's toes.
38:43A precise pattern of hexagonal plates.
38:47Each plate can move separately to line up with any irregularities on the surface,
38:52and the canals carry away any excess mucus that might separate the plates from the surface.
39:00At smaller scales again, each plate is covered with tiny bumps, the tips of which make close contact with the surface.
39:08So close that it's friction that stops a frog sliding down the glass.
39:16Which is making car tyre manufacturers sit up and take notice.
39:21Perhaps new and safer tyres based on the toes of a frog?
39:27But for sheer sticking power, nothing beats this creature.
39:31A gecko.
39:32Geckos can race up a vertical wall with no problems.
39:37And they can even hang upside down from the ceiling.
39:40It's been calculated that a gecko's feet are so sticky that it could support a weight of 25 kilograms before it falls off.
39:49All this on dry toes with no kind of adhesive whatsoever.
39:53Again, the secret lies in the microscopic detail of the gecko's toes.
40:01Like the fly's foot, the gecko's toes are covered in a dense mat of hairs.
40:11Moving closer still, each hair branches at the tip into dozens of microscopic hairs.
40:17Each of which is so tiny that it can get incredibly close to the surface of the wall.
40:22So close that it can feel the forces that attract molecules together.
40:27The van der Waals forces.
40:30The molecules of the gecko's hairs and those of the wall are drawn to each other.
40:35And the force, magnified millions of times by the huge number of hairs, produces a magnetic field.
40:41But with such sticking power, unsticking is a real problem.
40:51The gecko has to curl its toes to unpeel them from the surface before it can lift its foot.
40:58Scientists have developed a sticky tape covered in microscopic pillars that works on the same principle as a gecko's foot.
41:07But before they can use it to build their own mechanical geckos,
41:12they have to make sure that the tape is not too thick,
41:16so that the gecko's toes don't fall off the surface of the wall.
41:21At Case Western Reserve University in Ohio,
41:25this little robot has been designed to study just that.
41:29The way gecko tape sticks to glass and then unpeels.
41:34Once perfected, it should allow much bigger robots to work on it.
41:39But it's not as simple as it seems.
41:42The robot is designed to be able to unpeel from the surface of the wall.
41:47Once perfected, it should allow much bigger robots to climb securely as a gecko.
41:58Whether climbing, walking or flying, robots need a way to move their limbs.
42:05Often, designers use some sort of motor, where nature uses muscles.
42:17But these robots have been designed with devices that mimic the action of muscles.
42:23Flexible tubes in the same position as muscles are driven by air pressure,
42:28which forces the limbs to bend or straighten.
42:31A very similar action to living muscles.
42:34And the result is most lifelike.
42:37In most animals looked at so far,
42:40the energy needed to walk varies in a predictable way with the size of the animal.
42:47But nature has come up with one or two surprises.
42:55When caribou walk, they use far less energy than predictable animals.
43:01When caribou walk, they use far less energy than predicted by our equations.
43:19And when they move from hard ground to soft snow, the energy they use hardly increases.
43:27It's not entirely clear how they perform this trick, though their hooves certainly play a part.
43:33They're only loosely attached by ligaments and so can splay out like snowshoes when pressed onto the ground.
43:47But the real secret of their success must lie in making each swing of their legs as economic as possible.
43:57The caribou's extreme energy efficiency has been shaped by their need to make long treks over snowy landscapes.
44:15Each year, they move from more sheltered areas in the south, where they spent the winter,
44:21to more exposed coastal slopes, where the females will give birth.
44:27Here, the grazing is better, and they should find some respite from uncountable swarms of biting insects.
44:37But no one's yet braving these remote, mosquito-infested regions to work on a robo-caribou.
44:46Especially when there's more than enough inspiration much closer to home.
44:51Our own bodies have also been shaped by natural selection to produce our unique two-legged gait.
45:01Engineers at Honda in Japan have made detailed studies of the human leg as they've evolved their own bipedal robot, ASIMO.
45:11The positioning and flexibility of the joints in ASIMO's legs have been carefully modelled on those of humans.
45:21Giving ASIMO a very human-like movement.
45:25But walking on two legs, rather than four or six, is inherently unstable.
45:32We've solved this problem by having sophisticated balance organs in our ears,
45:37which, working with sensors that tell us the position and angle of our joints, produce some truly remarkable results.
45:44ASIMO's designers have copied this system and given it a range of joints and limb sensors,
45:50which means ASIMO can walk, run, turn, and even climb stairs extremely well.
46:01ASIMO uses a lot of energy to achieve its amazing performance,
46:06but it's possible to make a bipedal robot with the energy-efficient leg swing of a caribou.
46:11This robot has no power supply and no sophisticated control systems,
46:17but it can walk down a slope and coordinates its legs to avoid falling over.
46:25Give it a power supply and you've got Denise.
46:29All that this robot has is a sensor on the bottom of each foot.
46:33When one foot hits the ground, that tells the other one to kick off.
46:36Most of the energy to move forward comes from the pendulum-like swinging of the leg, just like a caribou.
46:47Denise uses only about a tenth of the power of ASIMO, and she's an empty-headed robot.
46:53All her coordination takes place without a central computer.
46:58In some ways, more like an insect.
47:02ASIMO is the exact opposite.
47:05All its complex abilities are controlled by a wireless link from a powerful computer.
47:10This is a very different approach from those studying the simple, localized controllers of insects.
47:16ASIMO needs a complicated central controller.
47:20There's a model for this in nature.
47:23The human brain is a very complex structure.
47:26But no one has yet come close to really understanding how that does what it does.
47:56As a new way of seeing the world, bio-inspiration is full of promise for new technology.
48:16But it's also a new way of seeing nature, and of appreciating the vast complexity of life.
48:23But the real joy of this new view is that inspiration can come from anywhere,
48:29from the lowliest creatures that we might just swat, to our own bodies.
48:38Nature is the biggest research library on the planet.
48:42It's just a question of knowing how to read it.
48:46In the next program, we see how, using nature's designs,
48:51we can manufacture advanced, intelligent materials,
48:55and develop elegant and unexpected methods of building.
49:15NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology