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Robots of the future won't just be smart, they could also have ninja-like reflexes.

Researchers in the US are studying the way cats and athletes rotate their body mid-air, and hope to recreate that movement in droids.

The aim is to reduce the impact on falling robots - especially those that may one day be used for search-and-rescue missions in hazardous conditions.

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In their experiments with a small robot consisting of a main body and two symmetric legs with paddles, the team compensated for the fact that a robot cannot move fast enough in by creating a reduced-gravity environment using a tilted surface

Professor Karen Liu at Georgia Tech University has been simulating the physics of everything from falling cats to the mid-air orientation of divers and astronauts.

'It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end,' Professor Liu said. 'One of the most important factors that determines the damage of the fall is the landing angle.'

The study involved using a small robot consisting of a main body and two symmetric legs with paddles.

The team compensated for the fact that a robot can't move fast enough by creating a reduced-gravity environment using a tilted surface.

THE 'CHEETAH-CUB' ROBOT THAT CAN RUN LIKE A CAT

A robot which can run like a cat at speeds of up to 3mph has been developed by researchers.

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, have modelled their design on the animal, with springs replacing tendons and small motors used in place of the muscles.

The four-legged 'cheetah-cub robot' - billed by its developers as small, light and fast - is said to be the fastest of all robots its size and can run nearly seven times its body length in one second.

Researchers said the robot's most impressive feature is the design of its legs, which are based on those of a cat - with the number of segments and their proportions the same as on the animal.

'We've developed it for very fast locomotion,' researcher Alexander Sprowitz said. 'In this case, we've mimicked a lot of the morphology of a house cat.

'Eventually the goal is to have a robot which is easy to use - very robust, very fast and very dynamically running - kind of naturally running.

He added: 'This morphology gives the robot the mechanical properties from which cats benefit - that's to say a marked running ability and elasticity in the right spots, to ensure stability.' 

'Cheetah-Cub Robot' reproduces feline morphology

Professor Karen Liu at Georgia Tech University has been simulating the physics of everything from falling cats to the mid-air orientation of divers

They simulated the elements of a long fall and explored the possibility of a 'soft roll' landing to reduce impact.

They found that a well-designed robot has the 'brain' to process the computation necessary to achieve a softer landing.

But, the current motor technology does not allow the hardware to move quickly enough for cat-like landings.

Future research aims at teaching a robot the skill of orientation and impact, a feat that falling humans cannot achieve, but cats perform naturally.

'Most importantly, the human brain cannot compute fast enough to determine the optimal sequence of poses the body needs to reach during a long-distance fall to achieve a safe landing,' the researchers note.

'Theoretically, no matter what initial position and initial speed we have, we can precisely control the landing angle by changing our body poses in the air,' said Jun Ueda, an associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

'In practice, however, we have a lot of constraints, like joint limits or muscle strength that prevent us from changing poses fast enough.'

Eventually, the hope is future robots will be able to fall and spring back up instead of ending up in the scrap heap.