A team of engineers from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) developed a soft robot about 5 inches in size that can reportedly jump as high as a basketball hoop. Additionally, it does it without legs.

High-Jumping Soft Robot

Their device is a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine. Even though it doesn’t have legs, the engineers say it jumps 10 feet in the air. Their inspiration apparently comes from nematodes. The team watched a video of the parasitic worms “pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward.” Their initial findings open up opportunities to develop devices that could jump across various terrains, at different heights, and in multiple directions.

“Nematodes are amazing creatures with bodies thinner than a human hair,” said Sunny Kumar, lead coauthor of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “They don’t have legs but can jump up to 20 times their body length. That’s like me [lying] down and somehow leaping onto a three-story building.”

Many nematodes are considered parasitic worms, latching onto hosts. Farmers and gardeners use them instead of pesticides to kill insects and protect plants. One way that nematodes latch onto hosts is by jumping. To hop backwards, the nematodes point their heads up and tighten the midpoint of their bodies to create a kink. Then, they use stored energy to propel backward. To jump forward, they create kinks the opposite way and propel forward.

The team of engineers created simulations of jumping nematodes and then created soft robots replicating their jumping behavior. The engineers later reinforced the soft robots with carbon fiber to “accelerate the jumps.”

According to the press release, the study suggests that the engineers could create simple elastic systems made of carbon fiber to “withstand and exploit kinks to hop across various terrain.”

“A jumping robot was recently launched to the moon, and other leaping robots are being created to help with search and rescue missions, where they have to traverse unpredictable terrain and obstacles,” Kumar said. “Our lab continues to find interesting ways that creatures use their unique bodies to do interesting things, then build robots to mimic them.”