Soft-bodied robot channels the cheetah to move fast

When we think of soft-bodied robots, we tend to picture things that slowly crawl like caterpillars. A new one is able to move much quicker, though, by leaping like a cheetah.The world’s fastest land animal, cheetahs run by rapidly flexing their spines between two stable states. A consortium of American scientists recently set out to replicate that motion in a soft robot. The resulting device is known as LEAP, which stands for “Leveraging Elastic instabilities for Amplified Performance.”Instead of muscles and a bi
Read More