News about Design & Soft Robotics

The SPPIRO robot, a soft origami in-pipe robot, shown inside a section of pipe.

An earthworm-inspired robot to inspect complex pipelines

June 9, 2026

An untethered robot can crawl along pipelines and maneuver around sharp turns and tight junctions to detect potential defects before they lead to costly failures.

A sequence of eight high-speed photos showing colorful water droplets exploding upward from a tiny soft actuator membrane, captured over just 3 milliseconds.

'Spark of Color' wins soft robotics art awards

April 16, 2026

The artwork captured the explosive beauty of combustion actuators through a high-speed camera, winning two awards at the 2026 IEEE RoboSoft conference in Kanazawa, Japan.

Rendering of a soft microrobot with onboard depth camera, soft actuators, and anchor feet for climbing plant stems.

Soft microrobots to rescue plants from pests receive $1M award

February 25, 2026

The USDA awarded Michigan researchers $1M to develop soft microrobots that climb plant stems to detect pests, led by Xiaonan Huang and Dmitry Berenson.

The robot has four legs with backward-facing knees. Each leg has three actuators, controlling hip ab/adduction, hip flexion/extension, and knee flexion/extension. Exposed wires link up to the motors. T.R.O.T is emblazoned on the case around the belly of the robot.

Open-source, modular robot for understanding evolution

February 11, 2026

A cost-effective, customizable quadruped could help researchers discover the particular advantages related to the length and segmentation of animal limbs.

Several renders of the SPARC robot as it travels precisely along paths on the ground, transitions to climbing walls, and travels along the wall with and without a payload.

Soft origami robot inch-worms up walls

September 24, 2025

Researchers developed a soft robot that can crawl along a flat path and climb up vertical surfaces using its unique origami structure with an accuracy typically seen only in rigid robots.

A robot made of three tubes and cables connecting them tumbles across the floor in different arrangements in this composite image.

Unique robot shape adopts advanced actuators for better performance

August 13, 2025

Using quasi-direct drive actuators, researchers developed a faster tensegrity robot with better capabilities for autonomy and payload capacity.

A Jerboa, a mouse like creature, jumping against a black background.

Mammal-like tails most promising for acrobatic robots

February 12, 2025

Roboticists have preferred the simplicity of lizard-like tails, but mammal-style tails may be both lighter and higher performance for turning a robot's body in space.