As a headless robot crawls over a pile of pebbles, its jointless, rubbery legs carefully but confidently sample the terrain in steady, yet unrushed movements that resemble a turtle's. The robot's ability to reliably walk across different types of surfaces is unique, and so is the fact that its elaborately shaped legs were created with a 3D printer, according to the engineers who developed the bio-inspired creature.
"With soft robots, you can do a lot of things that are difficult for a hard robot," said Mike Tolley, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego, who led the research. "[F]iguring out exactly how to place parts of your body or get around in a very unpredictable environment becomes a lot easier when your body is soft."
The combination of soft and stiff materials enables living creatures to adjust to the irregularities in terrain that frequently stop current rigid robots in their tracks.
"We see it could be useful in search and rescue, being able to crawl through rubble, but we would also like to use it in the study of nature," Tolley told Live Science. "Biologists could, for example, send it into tunnels that turtles dig to see what is in there without being too disruptive."
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