Biomechanics

1. Noah Cowan is taking an innovative approach to improving robotics, studying how animals process sensory information and turn it into motor commands for their muscles

2. Cowan's focus, in a nutshell, is the understanding of how those little feet—muscles, and sensors, and processors of all this information, in short, the entirety of this complicated system—work together.

3. Biomechanics

4. The BioMechanics Method® is a systematic process used to alleviate back pain and other chronic pain created by Justin Price, one of the top musculoskeletal assessment and corrective exercise experts in the world. This revolutionary approach to pain relief incorporates structural assessments, corrective exercise techniques and life coaching strategies into a simple system that makes improved function and pain-free living a reality for people plagued by muscle and joint pain. The BioMechanics Method has been used by Justin for nearly 20 years with absolutely amazing results to help people overcome the effects of back, neck, shoulder, knee, ankle and foot pain

5. Cowan doesn't see motions—a spider's trail or a snake's slither—as impossible; it's just another thing he "can't wait to understand." When you start paying attention, really paying attention, to how animals move, each day holds wonder. "I walked outside this morning and startled a squirrel. It shot across my yard, zipped up a fence, jumped up onto a telephone wire, ran across, leaped over onto a tree. How on earth does it do all that?" he asks. "It does it in a tiny little package with little feet. Everything matters!"

6. Noah Cowan

7. An associate professor of mechanical engineering, Cowan calls himself "a frustrated roboticist," explaining that he is both frustrated and fascinated by how animals move. "We have no idea how to synthesize machines that are anywhere near as good as animals. Over the last few years, I've switched my focus to one of just trying to understand. I want to know, even if I will never personally be the one to translate any of that information back to robotics." Just like he wanted to know why the hammer flips a certain way.

8. Biological Mechanisms of a cat

9. Animal Biomechanics

10. In the LIMBS lab, he and his students study the movements of cockroaches and weakly electric knife-fish. "I'm just deeply driven by a sense of curiosity," he says. "I want to know what's in front of me right now and why that is working."

11. Humans, he says, are important to study since we so often are the ultimate targets of investigation. But we can glean valuable insight from discovering analogous behaviors in animals. "Understanding fish locomotion control...is such a basic neurobiological question that if we can unlock some of the problems associated with that, it'll ultimately, hopefully, lead to big changes in our understanding of human motor disease." And from such basic insights often arise intriguing corollaries: "Wouldn't it be great if we could build machines that would work better with people to solve certain kinds of problems?"