The Lab
The Animal Locomotion Laboratory was established in 1997 by Daniel Schmitt and Pierre Lemelin. The intitial goal of the lab was to use an experimental approach involving human and nonhuman primates to investigate the functional and evolutionary of gait in our Order. This has since been expanded to included studies of locomotion in lizards with Matt Cartmill and primate tree gouging behaviors with Christopher Vinyard and Christine Wall. More recently in collaboration with Mark Hamrick (Medical College of Georgia), Ann Zumwalt and Daniel Schmitt have been investigating locomotor mechanics in hypermuscular mice.
The lab is equipped with three standard videocameras (Panasonic WV-D5100) and one high-speed digital cameral (Redlake MotionScope). The lab has runways instrumented a large force platform (Kistler 9281B) for primates and humans and a smaller platform (AMTI Hall Effects) for rodents. Motion analysis is accomplished throughout a variety of commercially availabe (Peak Performance Motus 2000) and purpose-written software.
