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 students at
00:07Yale have done with this shape-shifting robot. This is the amphibious robotic turtle or ART,
00:12a robot based off of creatures known to swim around in lakes and oceans. But this new device
00:17is more than meets the eye. It can adapt and change its shape on the fly to better suit
00:21different environments. This is Robert Baines, one of the PhD students working on the morphing
00:25robot to explain. So our unique approach to building this robot involves a design strategy
00:31in which we treat the robot's structure as a variable. So adaptive morphogenesis is the idea
00:38that the robot's body is made of all these components and that we can treat those which
00:43normally fixed materials as mutable as well. So it has little hooks that help it move across hard
00:49surfaces but then those transform into flat flippers when it reaches water creating a
00:53robot that's proficient on any terrain. I think it can really help in jobs like environmental
00:58monitoring for example of an estuary system where the robot would have to go between patches of land
01:04and patches of water and transition back and forth to survey and take data. Adding the device could
01:10also support divers retrieving items they might need from land and delivering them underwater.