Walking and Jumping

Publisher Summary This chapter explores walking and jumping abilities of insects. By evolving variations on a basic body plan, they have achieved remarkable dexterity in a wide range of environmental niches. To understand how an insect walks, one must subdivide the process. First, one must understand the movements of the legs and their constituent joints, and then begins to look at how muscles generate these movements and the circuits within the central nervous system that control motor activity. Over most walking speeds, sense organs of the limbs contribute to motor control by providing detailed information about the position, velocity, and the forces occurring in each leg. Therefore, one must also investigate the role of sensory input in the control of movement. Even with all this information, we will understand only how an animal can walk on a horizontal surface. But the aspects of walking in insects are truly remarkable and attract robotics engineers to them because of their abilities to run over and around obstacles, climb up walls, and jump over barriers. Often these adaptations occur through subtle changes in the basic pattern of locomotory behavior.