What words do you think of when you think of the word robot? Metal, hard, steel, glowing red eyes, deadly killing machine, soulless automaton? Well maybe some of those, anyways researchers at Tufts University have been working on engineering soft-bodied robots for use across a broad spectrum of applications. The picture at the top here shows one of their prototypes based on a completely soft-bodied animal, the caterpillar. Using systems that mimic biological methods of locomotion will allow robots to attain a much more natural way of moving around in the environment because rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, they are taking their cue from Nature who has had a long time to perfect efficient methods of locomotion. While the caterpillar is just the first start, what other shapes might robots take now that they are not bound to the forms of rigid metal construction? Nobody knows, but I think I have a pretty good guess….

That’s right, deadly FemBots

Hit the link to ScienceDaily for more info