New Robo-Salamander Can Really Move

With the help of X-ray videos, scientists have developed a new robot that mimics the way salamanders walk and swim. In general, scientists investigate animal locomotion for insights that could, among other things, help people recover from devastating losses of mobility, said study senior author Auke Ijspeert, a bioroboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Increasingly, scientists are creating robot copies of animals to perform such investigations of animal locomotion.