Neat! I recently attended a talk by Jayaram about his work with cockroaches: it's fascinating stuff, especially on a mechanical level. As someone else mentione

Neat! I recently attended a talk by Jayaram about his work with cockroaches: it's fascinating stuff, especially on a mechanical level. As someone else mentioned, size and weight are huge factors in kinetic design. Very roughly: when you're smaller than the dimensions of a mouse, you can crash into things and count on passive mechanisms to recover. The relative impact of crashes increases as you scale up, and so it becomes more worthwhile to have a neurological mechanism that can sense obstacles beforehand and come up with other ways to avoid them. Timing these neural signals also becomes an issue that scales with size. So cockroaches and other small animals can use very different movement-control mechanisms than we do, and the same scaling principle would apply to cockroach- or human-sized robots. For the cockroach in the first video, it's definitely sensing the wall and preparing itself to change trajectory. But cockroaches who just crash into walls and flail blindly to recover don't actually do worse than those who take the time and energy to anticipate the walls. This is because they're at the right size and material composition so that the crash doesn't debilitate them. And yes -- there are many, many more videos that Jayaram took as part of his work. Unfortunately I can't find any wall-crashing videos, but there are some squeezing videos here: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/8/E950/tab-figures-data http://www.pnas.org/content/113/8/E950/tab-figures-data