Researchers at Harvard and Cornell have designed a robot that can withstand fire, water and the business side of a Subaru, offering levels of resiliency that couldn’t possibly ever come back to bite humanity.
The thing is not pretty. It crawls around with all the grace of your grandfather trying to do “the worm” and looks like a mutant echinoderm that fell a few arms short of a starfish.
That’s actually not by accident. The machine fits into an emerging category known as “soft robots,” modeled on animals with nonrigid body parts like the starfish or squid. It’s made primarily out of silicone rubber and powered pneumatically, meaning it’s operated using pressurized gas.
The researchers believe the robot could be used for search-and-rescue operations in the aftermath of disasters like earthquakes, floods or nuclear meltdowns (and definitely not to one day enslave the human race).
The study will be published in the journal Soft Robotics, though an early version can be found online here.
Check out the video below, where researchers try to drown, drive over and BBQ the thing and it … just … keeps … coming.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?
Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:
First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.
Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.
So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)
If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.
Yes, I'll give $5/month
Yes, I'll give $5/month
We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and
Google Pay. You can also contribute via