locomotion

Inspired by insects, South Korean researchers have developed a robotic beetle with artificial muscles that allow it to get into tight spaces and grip objects. The coolest part? A human can control it with a flick of a finger – quite literally.

Researchers keep drawing inspiration from nature to build more advanced robots. This time, they turned to the feather star to design an aquatic robot capable of 3D maneuvering, which could change the way we explore the underwater world.

Remember that game children played where they repeatedly twisted two pencils held in a rubber band, and then let go to make the pencils jump around? Turns out they were practicing robotics, as scientists are now applying the idea to help robots jump.

A giant robotic worm can crawl over rocks, climb stairs and steep slopes, and swim through the water – and it does it all by shifting its own weight via a clever new water-pumping mechanism.

A new tiny robot called DirectHop costs less than a cup of coffee and weighs about as much as a paper clip. Inspired by fleas, it can jump up stairs, recover from bad landings, and explore places that larger machines can’t reach.

Using a liquid crystal elastomer cord, these earring-like robots can jump forward three times their body length, and upward 80 times their body height. One day extraplanetary exploration could utilize their descendants as zero-power drones.

Few things make the career jump from regional cuisine delicacy to robotics actuator. Yet, in research vaguely reminiscent of RoboCop, scientists have used skeletal muscle from a literal frog leg as an actuator to control a tiny robotic manta ray.

Engineers continue to draw inspiration from nature. Scientists from New York University have developed a robot that resembles a fish, and can be easily scaled up or down in size to explore different water bodies.

Engineers used adversarial inverse reinforcement learning to train robots to respond dynamically to uneven terrain and loss of limbs, a training system transferrable to dissimilar robots. And they did so using a stick insect as a role model.

The sandfish lizard moves very efficiently through the sand, and not surprisingly, it doesn't use wheels to do so. Scientists have now copied the reptile's swimming motion in an experimental Mars rover that outperforms others in sandy soil.

Most of nature – including humans – is symmetrical, and as creations reflect their creators, many robots we create today feature this symmetry. Flaunting this approach, researchers have created a sea-urchin-like robot with no perceivable symmetry.

The new “stingraybot” from a team at ETH Zurich (the Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland) offers enormous promise for surgery, medical care, wildlife biology, robotics, and more, thanks to muscular membranes of microbubbles.