Meet the Amphibious Robot That Walks on Land and Swims Like a Pro

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 students at

00:07Yale have done with this shape-shifting robot. This is the amphibious robotic turtle or ART,

00:12a robot based off of creatures known to swim around in lakes and oceans. But this new device

00:17is more than meets the eye. It can adapt and change its shape on the fly to better suit

00:21different environments. This is Robert Baines, one of the PhD students working on the morphing

00:25robot to explain. So our unique approach to building this robot involves a design strategy

00:31in which we treat the robot's structure as a variable. So adaptive morphogenesis is the idea

00:38that the robot's body is made of all these components and that we can treat those which

00:43normally fixed materials as mutable as well. So it has little hooks that help it move across hard

00:49surfaces but then those transform into flat flippers when it reaches water creating a

00:53robot that's proficient on any terrain. I think it can really help in jobs like environmental

00:58monitoring for example of an estuary system where the robot would have to go between patches of land

01:04and patches of water and transition back and forth to survey and take data. Adding the device could

01:10also support divers retrieving items they might need from land and delivering them underwater.