This Robot Looks Like a Pancake and Jumps Like a Maggot

Researchers designed a soft, legless robot that can hop and navigate obstacle courses.

If a pancake could dream, it might long for legs so it could jump off your breakfast plate in pursuit of a better, unchewed life.

But legs, it turns out, are not necessary for something as flat as a flapjack to hop around. A group of scientists has designed a tortilla-shaped robot that can jump several times per second and higher than seven times its body height of half a centimeter. They report that the robot, which is the size of a squished tennis ball and weighs about the same as a paper clip, nimbly performs these feats without any semblance of feet. Their research was published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Shuguang Li, a roboticist at Harvard who was not involved with the research, called the new robot “a clever idea” and “an important contribution to the soft robotics field.”