Harvard Engineers have designed and built a frog-like robot that can jump six times its height without breaking - and it's 3-D printed.
The robot is made up of hard and soft parts and is powered by a mix of butane and oxygen. It can survive up to 30 jumps without breaking, and it can jump half its width when jumping sideways.
The team behind the development of the jumping robot aims to make this model help in the future of rescue robots, as they are more resistant to damage and can tolerate harsher situations.
The body was 3-D printed with a gradient of rigidity, meaning, they used both hard and soft substances, but in different ratios. The first layer was almost entirely hard material with a little soft material, the next layer had slightly more soft material in it, and so on until the ninth, softest layer, according to LA Times.
"This robot is a demonstration of a method to integrate the rigid components with the body of the soft robot through a gradient of material properties, eliminating an abrupt hard-to-soft transition that is often a failure point," said senior author Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Daily Mail reports.
