Nifty Little Robot

"Many robotics researchers are now taking inspiration from nature. It's not only the brains of the animals they're copying, but also their shapes and their behavior in unpredictable situations.

Swiss researchers developed a model of a salamander's spinal cord and created a similar system to control the movement of their salamander robot. It receives electrical signals from a wireless laptop that can tell it to switch from swimming to walking and to change speed or direction. Nature helped these scientists, but it also turned out that their robot helped neuro-biologists understand four-legged locomotion.

Footage courtesy of: University of Essex, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Carnegie Mellon University, ULB-EPFL, Tokyo Institute of Technology, National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (AIST).