YouTube video by Veritasium

Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. ...

The innovation could lead to new drug delivery methods...

A research team from AMOLF in Amsterdam has created a soft robot that walks, hops, and swims—all without a brain, electronics, or AI. Just soft tubes, air, and some clever physics.

It runs like a stotting gazelle and swims like a dog.

“If we cut or limit funding for curiosity-driven research, we risk shutting down the pipeline of future innovation,” writes Carole LaBonne of Northwestern.

The development of active solids based on centimetre-scale building blocks incorporating odd elasticity shows that they can spontaneously undergo limit cycles of shape changes, leading to adaptive locomotion such as rolling and crawling.

In the field of soft robotics, a long-term goal is the creation of responsive systems, for applications such as controlled drug release or autonomous exploration of unknown terrain. We introduce a com...