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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Our future robot overlords could have feline cunning and cat-like reflexes thanks in part to research being conducted at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.
Professor Karen Liu and her team have been studying how cats and athletic humans optimize their body position in mid-air to achieve a softer landing, and then applying those learnings to optimize a falling bot.
This type of mid-fall agility to orient a body to reduce impact comes naturally to cats but is something humans aren’t natively gifted with. “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.
