A dog with three legs might be a pitiful sight to see, but researchers at the university of lena in Thuringia, Germany, view the dog's misfortune as an opportunity to learn more about odd-limbed locomotion.
A research team led by Martin Gross, a Ph.D. candidate with the university's locomotion laboratory, used 10 high-tech infrared cameras to record canine amputees walking and running on a treadmill.
Some dogs were missing a forelimb; others were missing a hind limb. Researchers outfitted the dogs with reflective markers, which allowed the scientists to track their movements with pinpoint precision. They mapped out each dog's gait and movement characteristics, and compared them to others.
The researchers found that the dogs employed varying coping techniques or "compensation strategies" depending on which limb was missing. The strategies used to compensate for missing forelimbs proved more complicated than those for missing hind limbs.
If a forelimb was missing, the dog's remaining limbs had to adapt to coordinate with one another, a process the researchers called "gait compensation." With a hind-leg amputation, however, they found that the forelimbs continued to act as they would normally in a four legged dog. Why the difference? Researchers speculated that because dogs' forelimbs carry more body weight, the dogs needed to compensate to account for the lack of support.
The study is part of the European Union's Locomorph project, an ongoing research project that seeks to develop a more comprehensive understanding of locomotive activity, and improve robot efficiency and usability. The findings were presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting in Prague in luly.
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