Walking on Land and Swimming in the Sea Are Just Some of the Highlights Of This Robot

The researchers believe this could was anusher in a new age of shape-shifting robots.

Transcript

00:00Oftentimes, researchers will look to nature for inspiration, and that's exactly what

00:06students at Yale have done with this shape-shifting robot.

00:10This is the Amphibious Robotic Turtle, or ART, a robot based off of creatures known

00:14to swim around in lakes and oceans.

00:16But this new device is more than meets the eye.

00:18It can adapt and change its shape on the fly to better suit different environments.

00:22This is Robert Baines, one of the PhD students working on the morphing robot, to explain.

00:27So our unique approach to building this robot involves a design strategy in which we treat

00:32the robot's structure as a variable.

00:36So adaptive morphogenesis is the idea that the robot's body is made of all these components,

00:42and that we can treat those, which are normally fixed materials, as mutable as well.

00:47So it has little hooks that help it move across hard surfaces, but then those transform into

00:51flat flippers when it reaches water, creating a robot that's proficient on any terrain.

00:55I think it can really help in jobs like environmental monitoring, for example of an estuary system,

01:01where the robot would have to go between patches of land and patches of water, and transition

01:06back and forth to survey and take data.

01:09Adding the device could also support divers, retrieving items they might need from land

01:13and delivering them underwater.