Click Beetle Independent Study

Project Description:

My independent study centered around click beetles and initially focused on developing an understanding of the kinematics involved in a click beetle’s jump, followed by determining a way to replicate its jump. The click beetle has developed an evolutionary biologic mechanism allowing it self-correction from an overturned state. When click beetles find themselves on the ground and inverted flat on their backs, they will contour their bodies in a specific way to harness energy like a spring. They then release this energy very quickly in order to elevate and rotate their bodies, thus landing themselves back on their legs. This sudden release of energy allows them to accomplish high elevation jumps while their unique geometry and center of mass location allow them to rotate mid-air. This capacity to self-correct is what we were interested in studying with the ultimate project goal of applying this knowledge into developing a self-righting mechanism for autonomous robots in the future. Their jump can be divided into three stages: pre-jump (beetle is contouring its hinge to harness the energy), take-off (energy at the hinge is released and the beetle begins to jump), and airborne (beetle is in the air). The goal of my independent study, specifically, was to characterize the take-off stage of the click beetle’s jump. The take-off stage of the click beetle had been theorized to be modeled as a crank-slider system and therefore my independent study began with first understanding the crank slider model. I performed Dynamic Force Analyses on the beetle during the take-off stage in MATLAB which utilized both kinematic and barycentric equations. After a firm understanding of the crank-slider model was developed, I was then tasked with creating a beetle prototype that replicated the beetle’s take-off stage and a working experimental setup that would be used as a launcher for testing the beetle’s jumps.