Rajat Mittal, an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, had a common household problem: crickets in his basement. He tried sticky traps. He tried everything to get them out. But then, something struck him about the creatures he couldn't quite get with a newspaper or shoe.
"The more I saw them, the more I realized they're quite amazing in terms of their jumps," Mittal said. "They seemed to jump and seemed to land on their feet."
Mitall, whose work centers around aerodynamics, has taken inspiration from his home before, including watching squirrels in his back yard. But something struck him about the crickets. They were behaving less like a chaotic insect, and a little more like, well, a ballistic missile.
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"That to me was very surprising, because anything launched in the air unless it is aerodynamically designed, it should tumble through the air as it goes through," he said.
When the spider cricket jumps, it extends its hind legs and folds back its antennas. This allows it to be as streamlined as possible when making the jump. But about 40 percent of the way through its parabolic arc, the bug began to transition to another stance. It extended its limbs into a different configuration, allowing itself enough control of its descent to land on its feet.
More impressively, it can do so while outperforming other jumping insects. While a grasshopper can jump 30-40 times its body size, crickets can jump 50-60 times their own. Only jumping spiders seem to be able to compete among the flightless arthropods. By landing on its feet, it also means that the cricket can quickly regather for its next move. Indeed, the behavior was virtually the same among all the spider crickets studied.
The biggest application for the research right now? Robotics.
A jumping robot may be able to quickly move and maneuver itself across terrain, with a swarm of small cricket-bots covering a large distance in a search and rescue effort or other observations in a short amount of time. By studying not just the jumps but the aerodynamics of landing on their feet, the bots could regather quickly from each jump and continue on their mission.
Mittal's work is mostly in aerodynamics, not robotics. Thus, before he could work with any robotics engineers, he needs more data on the physics and math of how the cricket flies – not just the streamlined shape the body takes, but the specifics of the arc and other underlying aerodynamic principles. But Mittal is eager to learn more about the insects that don't quite fly.
"I think this is very fascinating, because these insects inhabit a world that's between flying and walking or crawling insects," he says.