Inspired by a tiny parasitic worm, engineers at Georgia Tech have created a remarkable 5-inch robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop—around 10 feet.
What makes this even more impressive is that the robot doesn’t have any legs. Instead, it uses a flexible silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine to catapult itself into the air.
This unique design is based on how nematodes, small roundworms, move and jump in nature.
Nematodes are some of the most abundant creatures on Earth, living in the soil, water, and even inside plants and animals.
These tiny worms are thinner than a human hair, yet they can jump up to 20 times their body length.
For comparison, that would be like a person lying down and somehow leaping onto the roof of a three-story building. Farmers even use them to control pests because of their unique jumping abilities, which help them latch onto hosts.
To better understand how these tiny creatures jump, Victor Ortega-Jimenez, a former research scientist at Georgia Tech and now a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, spent over a year studying them.
Using high-speed cameras, he captured detailed footage of nematodes bending their bodies into different shapes to launch themselves forward or backward.
The footage revealed that nematodes create a kink in their body to store energy, similar to how someone might crouch before a jump. When the kink is released, the energy propels them into the air.
This discovery inspired engineers at Georgia Tech to design a soft robot that could mimic the nematode’s movements. Sunny Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, led the team alongside Ishant Tiwari, another researcher in the same lab.
Together, they built a series of soft robots that replicated the jumping action. After several tests, the team reinforced the robots with carbon fibers to make the jumps faster and more powerful.
The result was a robot that could leap 10 feet into the air—despite having no legs. The key to its power lies in the same kink-based movement seen in nematodes. While kinks are usually seen as problems in everyday life—like when a garden hose twists and cuts off water—these tiny worms use them to store and release energy, allowing them to jump with incredible force.
The team believes that the design could be useful for more than just scientific curiosity. Jumping robots are already being considered for missions to the moon, and engineers are exploring their use in search-and-rescue missions, where they could hop over rough or dangerous terrain.
The project is part of Associate Professor Saad Bhamla’s lab at Georgia Tech and was carried out with the help of researchers from the University of California, Riverside. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
The success of this legless, jumping robot shows how even the smallest creatures can inspire big ideas. With continued research, the engineers hope to improve the design further, making it even more powerful and adaptable for real-world applications.
Source: Georgia Tech.
