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.