Soft Robot Walks by Repeatedly Blowing Itself Up

It’s hard to beat the energy density of chemical fuels. Batteries are quiet and clean and easy to integrate with electrically-powered robots, but they’re 20 to 50 times less energy dense than a chemical fuel like methanol or butane. This is fine for most robots that can afford to just carry around a whole bunch of batteries, but as you start looking at robots that are insect-size or smaller, batteries simply don’t scale down very well. And it’s not just the batteries&mdas