squirls skills

Squirrels leaping from wobbly perches across impossibly large gaps, parkouring off walls, scrambling to recover from tricky landings.

Just another YouTube video documenting the crazy antics of squirrels hell-bent on reaching peanuts?

No, these videos are part of a study to understand the split-second decisions squirrels make routinely as they race through the tree canopy, jumping from branch to branch, using skills honed to elude deadly predators.

The payoff to understanding how squirrels learn the limits of their agility could be better robots with better control to nimbly move through varied landscapes, such as the rubble of a collapsed building in search of survivors. It could also lead to a better understanding of movement problems that come with age.

Biologists like Robert Full at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown over the last few decades how animals like geckos, cockroaches and squirrels physically move and how their reflexes help them in sticky situations — all of which have been applied to making more agile robots — but now they are tackling a harder problem: How does an animal decide whether or not to take a leap? How do they assess their biomechanical abilities to know whether they can stick the landing?