Bees navigate long distances without satellites, digital maps, or external guidance. By reading patterns ...

About five years ago, a bizarre idea occurred to me. At the time, I was designing complex electronic circuits to mimic a small portion of an insect brain. These circuits would be created on a tiny ...

An orange wheel rolls across concrete and suddenly jumps, as if it decided to ...

A new study from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute used a robot to mimic common big-eared bats' echolocation skills ...

Kaushik Jayaram envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or ...

An organic synapse array enables night vision and pattern recognition in insect robots by detecting near-infrared light and triggering real-time motor responses. (Nanowerk Spotlight) Insect-scale ...

CNN: Kathryn Daltorio, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, lends her expertise to the discussion of how scientists are learning more from insects in the development of robots, including ...

This spinning-mass principle drives several robots in development. One is a remote-controlled wheel that jumps when the internal mass rotates fast enough to lift it off the ground. Unlike spring-based ...

A 301 mg soft robot jumps continuously under constant light without batteries or electronics, using snap-through buckling and self-shadowing to create an autonomous feedback loop. (Nanowerk Spotlight) ...

Shape-morphing, insect-scale robots that feature an origami-inspired design and eight independently actuated degrees of freedom, powered by custom piezoelectric actuators for enhanced mechanical ...