Nature Inspired: Robot That Walks On Water And Jumps

A team of scientists have created miniature robots mimicking the Water Strider, discovering how the insect achieves this feat.

Scientists from Seoul National University, Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, discovered that water striders exert just the right amount of force and maintain precise contact with water surface for just the right amount of time to lift-off without breaking through. All of this achieved without complex cognitive skills.

"Water's surface needs to be pressed at the right speed for an adequate amount of time, up to a certain depth, in order to achieve jumping. The water strider is capable of doing all these things flawlessly," the study's co-senior author Kyu Jin Cho said in a press release.

The robotic insects were deployed in multiple iterations to learn the mechanics of water strider jump through trial and error. When the robots got it right, they could exert as much as 16 times its body weight on water surface to jump.

"This international collaboration of biologists and roboticists has not only looked into nature to develop a novel, semi-aquatic bioinspired robot that performs a new extreme form of robotic locomotion, but has also provided us with new insights on the natural mechanics at play in water striders," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber.