Squishy robots can drop from a helicopter and land safely

Berkeley News  April 24, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, industry, NASA) started designing these “tensegrity” robots — which combine the forces of tension and compression to create stable structures in hopes of creating a robot that could safely fall from space to explore Saturn’s moon, Titan. The new soccer-ball-shaped robots, created by engineers at UC Berkeley and Squishy Robotics, have the remarkable ability to fall from a height of more than 600 feet and be no worse for wear. Built of a network of rods linked by contracting cables, they can also shapeshift in order […]