This remarkable looking little robot is using what would be called muscle memory in humans to adapt to travel over rough terrain. Resembling a scorpion, it is designed to control chaotic movements and essentially make its motions non-chaotic. What this means is that the hexapod robot can move autonomously over a rugged surface. You can see video on the Scientific American site and read the rest of the story there too.
Credit: Poramate Manoonpong and Marc Timme, University of Goettingen and Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization
"Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience researcher Poramate Manoonpong and Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization researcher Marc Timme are leading a project that has created a six-legged robot with one CPG that can switch gaits depending upon the obstacles it encounters."
via www.scientificamerican.com
