Worm-Inspired Soft Robot Leaps 10 Feet Without Legs

[garryenlkert]

Engineers at Georgia Tech have developed a 5-inch soft robot that can leap 10 feet into the air—roughly the height of a basketball hoop—despite having no legs. The design was inspired by the acrobatic jumps of microscopic parasitic worms called nematodes.

Constructed from a silicone rod reinforced with a carbon-fiber spine, the robot mimics the unique way nematodes bend and coil their bodies to launch themselves both forward and backward. This innovation, described in Science Robotics, could pave the way for agile robots capable of navigating challenging terrain with high precision and flexibility.

“Nematodes are incredible creatures, thinner than a human hair, and yet they can leap 20 times their body length,” said Sunny Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and co-lead author of the study. “That’s like me lying down and somehow jumping onto a three-story building.”

Nematodes are among the most abundant organisms on Earth, inhabiting soil, water, and even the bodies of plants, animals, and humans. Some species are used in agriculture to protect crops by targeting harmful pests. These tiny creatures use jumping as a means of attaching to hosts or moving through their environments, despite lacking limbs.

Using high-speed cameras, Victor Ortega-Jimenez—formerly at Georgia Tech and now at the University of California, Berkeley—captured the mechanics of these jumps. Nematodes bend their bodies into specific configurations that store elastic energy. When released, that energy propels them into the air. Depending on where the body is pinched, they can control the direction of the jump—either backward like a backflip or upward in a broad-jump motion.

“They achieve this by shifting their center of mass,” explained Kumar. “We haven’t seen any other small-scale organism that can jump in both directions with such control and symmetry.”

The researchers recreated this behavior in their robot, first through simulation and then with physical prototypes. By reinforcing the flexible silicone with carbon fibers, they were able to drastically increase the energy release and speed of the jump. The robot completes each leap in just a tenth of a millisecond and can perform repeated jumps thanks to its durable, elastic structure.

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One surprising aspect of the study was the effectiveness of body kinks—normally seen as structural failures—in storing energy. “Kinks in hoses or straws usually render them useless,” said Ishant Tiwari, another postdoctoral fellow and co-lead author. “But for nematodes, and now for our robot, a kink is a functional feature that allows high-performance motion.”

The project, conducted in Associate Professor Saad Bhamla’s lab, included collaborators from the University of California, Riverside. The team’s work highlights how biological strategies at microscopic scales can inspire innovative engineering solutions.

As robots increasingly need to operate in complex, unpredictable environments—such as disaster zones or extraterrestrial surfaces—these findings could help inform the design of simple, lightweight systems that move by hopping rather than walking or rolling.

“A leaping robot was recently deployed to the moon,” noted Kumar. “Our design points toward future robots that are not only lightweight and efficient but also capable of adapting to a wide variety of terrains.”