Biobots: Snakebot, Batbot, and More Fantastical Machines Inspired by Nature

[Narrator] They can walk like humans,

or four-legged animals.

They can slither like snakes, and yes,

even crawl like insects like Hexa here.

Over just the past couple years, robots have exploded.

Sometimes literally.

But they're showing up all over the place,

and taking an astounding range of forms

which roboticists have largely borrowed from nature.

We're talking salamanders and even octopuses,

because it turns out nature kinda knows what it's doing

when it comes to locomotion.

So come with us on a journey through a fascinating world

of bio-mimicry, a cornerstone of modern robotics.

Nothing will bite, I promise.

(electronic glitching)

Evolution is the greatest creative force

the world has ever known.

It's helped animals conquer land, sea and air

with a galaxy of body forms.

So it's here where roboticists often look for inspiration.

First up, snake bot.

These robots are basically composed of

about 16 individual motors or actuators, server motors.

And how they're actually arranged allows us to take on

these three dimensional shapes, which amongst other things,

allows me to do things like side winds.

So you can actually see the robot here is moving

a lot like desert dwelling side winding snakes.

[Narrator] While snake bot is decidedly serpentine,

these researchers never set out to copy a snake

muscle for muscle and bone for bone.

They wanted its mobility.

Snakes can climb and squeeze through tight spaces,

and so can snake bot.

Copying a snake's physiology exactly would be both

impossible and unnecessary, but what's special about

snake bot is it can actually pull off maneuvers

like this that a real snake never could.

It won't be jumping anytime soon, but Salto definitely is.

This one-legged robot was inspired by a critter

called the bush baby which has a vertical leap of six feet.

The bush baby uses something called super crouch posture

where it stores a bunch of energy and suddenly releases it.

Same with Salto.

But that's just the start of the challenge of

not only jumping, but bounding off things.

Salto is controlled by setting its orientation

in the air based on where it is, how fast it's going,

where we want it to be and how fast we want it to be going.

So in the air it simply picks an orientation to land with.

Once it lands, we detect contact, apply a little burst

of energy to get it back off the ground and then repeat.

[Narrator] Moving rather more methodically is

MicroTug from Stanford.

Inspired by the stickiness of gecko feet,

this tiny wonder can pull 2,000 times its own weight.

That's like you dragging 300,000 pounds.

The secret is a whole bunch of tiny rubber hairs

that stick the robot to the ground

as a wench pulls the object.

A group of them tethered together can even pull a car.

But why crawl when you can fly?

At Caltech, researchers have built a robot bat

which again will not bite.

It's got a skeleton of carbon fiber

and wings made of silicone.

The robot bat is another case where researchers

didn't bother strictly copying an animal.

These wings have nine joints instead of

40 you'd find in a bat.

Natural selection crafted the bat over millennia,

but roboticists took that design and simplified it.

So taking inspiration from the physiology of animals

is one thing but what about replicating evolution itself?

This is DyRET.

It's actually teaching itself to walk by falling down.

It tries new gaits and selects that ones

that work best in a certain environment.

Out here in the snow, it automatically adjusts

to lower its center of gravity for more stability,

thus it adapts to environment like

a species might in nature.

So robots can mimic animals and even evolution,

but they can also mimic collective behavior.

Ants are great at two things: ruining picnics

and working together to build their homes.

Microbots collaborate like ants to build

impressive structures like this lattice.

Some robots deposit glue and others add rods.

We can have robots that specialize in handling

active components like resistors, LEDs.

[Narrator] That means microbots can work together

to build complex structures that are sturdier

than what you'd get with 3D printing.

And bio-mimicry can also help scientists better study

and protect animals.

Take this robotic fish from MIT.

It swims by pumping water into two

opposing chambers in the tail.

Researchers remote control it not with radio waves,

which don't work underwater, but with acoustic signals.

One day the robot could go fully autonomous

to blend into a coral reef.

That could give scientists unprecedented insight

into these ecosystems, and then there's fembot.

Yes, that's its actual name.

It's a taxidermy bird stuck on some wheels.

It's both hilarious and useful.

Biologist Gail Patricelli uses it to spy on sage grouse

and species under thread.

Over the last decade or so, they've been the focus

of one of the biggest conservation efforts in U.S. history.

[Narrator] This is what the robot looks like

without its bird shell.

The shape is a fiberglass mold with a body from

an online taxidermy store.

[Gail] It's kinda got a crazy escaped rotisserie chicken

with some sort of something S and M going on there

look when it's halfway built, but this is all elastic.

This is nylons, I actually used a pair of Spanx

that I ripped apart.

[Narrator] Fembot is helping Patricelli better understand

the sage grouse so she can better protect it.

So from a robot bird to a robot snake

to a robot whatever this is, machines inspired by nature

are making big strides.