The researchers believe this could was anusher in a new age of shape-shifting robots.
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00:00Oftentimes, researchers will look to nature for inspiration, and that's exactly what
00:06students at Yale have done with this shape-shifting robot.
00:10This is the Amphibious Robotic Turtle, or ART, a robot based off of creatures known
00:14to swim around in lakes and oceans.
00:16But this new device is more than meets the eye.
00:18It can adapt and change its shape on the fly to better suit different environments.
00:22This is Robert Baines, one of the PhD students working on the morphing robot, to explain.
00:27So our unique approach to building this robot involves a design strategy in which we treat
00:32the robot's structure as a variable.
00:36So adaptive morphogenesis is the idea that the robot's body is made of all these components,
00:42and that we can treat those, which are normally fixed materials, as mutable as well.
00:47So it has little hooks that help it move across hard surfaces, but then those transform into
00:51flat flippers when it reaches water, creating a robot that's proficient on any terrain.
00:55I think it can really help in jobs like environmental monitoring, for example of an estuary system,
01:01where the robot would have to go between patches of land and patches of water, and transition
01:06back and forth to survey and take data.
01:09Adding the device could also support divers, retrieving items they might need from land
01:13and delivering them underwater.