Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have taken inspiration from one of Earth’s smallest creatures to achieve a giant leap in robotics. They have developed a 5-inch, soft robot capable of jumping 10 feet high – roughly the height of a standard basketball hoop – all without the benefit of legs.
The surprising muse for this feat is the nematode, or roundworm, a minuscule parasite often thinner than a human hair.
Researchers observed these tiny creatures using high-speed cameras and discovered their unique method of locomotion: nematodes contort their bodies into specific kinked shapes to store and then explosively release energy, flinging themselves forward or backward.
“Nematodes are amazing creatures,” said Sunny Kumar, a lead coauthor of the study published recently in Science Robotics and a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech’s 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 laying down and somehow leaping onto a three-story building.”
The research, led by Kumar, former Georgia Tech scientist Victor Ortega-Jimenez (now at UC Berkeley), and ChBE postdoctoral fellow Ishant Tiwari, involved painstaking observation.
“It took me over a year to develop a reliable method to consistently make these tiny worms leap from a piece of paper and film them for the first time in great detail” Ortega-Jimenez said.
Their videos revealed how nematodes control their jumps. To leap backward, they kink their mid-body like a squatting human before launching end-over-end. For a forward jump, they kink their tail end high, resembling a standing broad jumper, and catapult upwards.
“Changing their center of mass allows these creatures to control which way they jump,” Kumar explained.
Remarkably, the worms achieve this using kinks – formations usually detrimental in other systems.
“Kinked blood vessels can lead to strokes. Kinked straws are worthless,” observed Tiwari. “But a kinked nematode stores energy that is used to propel itself in the air.” The worms release this stored energy in a fraction of a millisecond.
Mimicking this natural phenomenon, the engineering team, working in Associate Professor Saad Bhamla’s lab and collaborating with researchers at UC Riverside, first created simulations. They then built a simple robot consisting of a silicone rod, later reinforcing it with a carbon-fiber spine to enhance the speed and power of the jump, effectively replicating the nematode’s kinking and leaping mechanism.
The team found that the kinks allow the nematodes, and consequently their robotic counterpart, to store significant elastic energy and release it rapidly. This principle, they believe, could revolutionize how robots navigate challenging environments.
“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 stated.
This nematode-inspired design offers a new approach, demonstrating how simple, legless systems could potentially jump across varied terrains at different heights and directions by harnessing the power of controlled kinking.
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