Alien-like synthetic tentacles
By Charles Carter, 25/10/22 Innovators from Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have created rubbery pneumatic tentacles that can entangle objects and pick them up – shades of the aliens from Independence Day. This new approach to robotic grasping is much simpler than existing methods with no need for embedded sensors […]
Amphibious undulating bionic bot
By Charles Carter, 23/09/22 US startup Pliant Energy Systems has developed an amphibious robot, Velox, that mimics ray, millipede, squid and snake locomotion to travel across water, ice, snow and sand. It’s highly maneuverable and versatile, which makes it suitable for a range of applications including sea rescue missions, inspecting coral reefs and providing thrust […]
Microplastic-eating bionic fish
By Charles Carter, 02/11/22 The Natural Robotics Contest built a prototype of this year’s winning entry from Eleanor Mackinstosh: Gillbert, a bionic fish that eats microplastic by filtering it from ingested water using mesh gills. Eleanor’s idea was to mimic how fish swim and extract oxygen from water to help clean up microplastic pollution in […]
