nature

A team of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using the movement of centipedes to develop a new theory of multilegged locomotion. They created many-legged robotic models, discovering the robot with redundant legs could move across uneven surfaces without any additional sensing or control technology as the theory predicted.

A tiny robot that could one day help doctors perform surgery was inspired by the gripping ability of geckos and the efficient locomotion of inchworms. The robot, developed by engineers at the University of Waterloo, utilizes ultraviolet (UV) light and magnetic force to move on any surface, even up walls and across ceilings.

The rapid retreat of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica appears to be driven by different processes under its floating ice shelf than researchers previously understood. Novel observations from where the ice enters the ocean show that while melting beneath much of the ice shelf is weaker than expected, melting in cracks and crevasses is much faster.

Individual ants are relatively simple creatures and yet a colony of ants can perform really complex tasks, such as intricate construction, foraging and defense. Recently, Harvard researchers took inspiration from ants to design a team of relatively simple robots that can work collectively to perform complex tasks using only a few basic parameters. 

A bird landing on a branch makes the maneuver look like the easiest thing in the world, but in fact, the act of perching involves an extremely delicate balance of timing, high-impact forces, speed, and precision. It’s a move so complex that no flapping-wing robot (ornithopter) has been able to master it, until now.

Inspired by the biomechanics of the manta ray, researchers at North Carolina State University have developed an energy-efficient soft robot that can swim more than four times faster than previous swimming soft robots. The robots are called “butterfly bots,” because their swimming motion resembles the way a person’s arms move when they are swimming the butterfly stroke.

A gripper robot has been developed that can grasp all types of objects, from very fine or thin objects such as acupuncture needles and sewing needles to large objects such as boxes.

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have designed a new type of soft, robotic gripper that uses a collection of thin tentacles to entangle and ensnare objects, similar to how jellyfish collect stunned prey.

A new drive system for flapping wing autonomous robots has been developed by a University of Bristol team, using a new method of electromechanical zipping that does away with the need for conventional motors and gears.

Steep sections on slippery ground, high steps, scree and forest trails full of roots: the path up the 1,098-metre-high Mount Etzel at the southern end of Lake Zurich is peppered with numerous obstacles. But ANYmal, the quadrupedal robot from the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, overcomes the 120 vertical metres effortlessly in a 31-minute hike. That’s 4 minutes faster than the estimated duration for human hikers – and with no falls or missteps.