A Georgia Tech robot skips wheels, legs and compressed gas; it relies on geometry, elasticity and a carbon-fiber spine to vault 10 feet, the height of a basketball rim.
By turning a “kink,” normally a structural failure, into an elastic spring that releases about10⁴ W kg⁻¹ of power, the team shows a compact way to shoot limbless robots over obstacles that would stop wheels or tracks. That could pay off in search-and-rescue work, where rubble is uneven, or in off-world scouting: NASA’s own micro-hopper concepts rely on similar ballistic hops to cross loose regolith, which is essentially loose rock and dust.
Published in Science Robotics and described in a press release, Georgia Tech’s work began not in a machine shop but under a microscope, where engineers filmed parasitic nematodes twisting their hair-thin bodies into α-shaped knots that launched them 20 body lengths in a blink. By mapping those contortions frame-by-frame, the team reverse-engineered a silicone “worm” with a carbon-fiber backbone that stores strain in the same kink, then snaps open in 100 microseconds to clear a ten-foot bar
Featuring a carbon fiber backbone, the robot can jump roughly 25 body lengths.
What makes this “kink-powered” jump effective is the ability to store significantly more elastic energy within that sharp bend compared to a gentler curve. The design can also release it within a tenth of a millisecond, according to the researchers. This rapid, explosive energy discharge generates the peak power essential for the height achieved. It demonstrates how deliberately harnessing, rather than simply avoiding, material instabilities like kinks can unlock potent and efficient engineering strategies for extreme performance in simple systems.
Nematodes are amazing creatures with bodies thinner than a human hair.
The five-inch prototype isn’t a one-jump gimmick. Sliding the kink toward either end lets the team launch the rod forward or backward with nearly identical height, and bench tests show the silicone–carbon composite survives dozens of landings with no visible fatigue. “Changing the center of mass lets us control direction,” lead author Sunny Kumar said, adding that the design repeated the cycle “multiple times” without tearing or delamination. Those early durability numbers, plus the mold-and-cast simplicity of the chassis, suggest future swarms of disposable hoppers that could be scattered across rubble piles, or dusty lunar pits, to relay images while bigger robots lumber behind.
