Squirrels are famous for their incredible agility—leaping across gaps, bouncing between branches, and landing with ease.
Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have created a robot that mimics these squirrel-like moves.
Inspired by how squirrels jump and land, the one-legged robot, named Salto, can now leap onto narrow perches and stick the landing—something no robot has done before.
The work, published in Science Robotics, represents a major step forward in designing agile robots that can handle tricky environments, such as collapsed buildings, dense forests, or construction sites.
According to UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full, squirrels are some of nature’s best athletes. By studying their control strategies, his team aims to help robots become much more nimble.
Salto has been around since 2016, known for its jumping and parkour skills on flat ground. But jumping onto narrow branches was another challenge.
The breakthrough came when the team combined biological insights with robotics.
Former UC Berkeley graduate student Justin Yim and Full’s lab observed how squirrels control their bodies mid-air and adjust their legs when landing.
When a squirrel undershoots a landing, it crouches and adjusts its balance.
When it overshoots, it stiffens its legs and leans back—just like humans might do when trying to land precisely in a game like hopscotch.
By programming these same responses into Salto and redesigning how the robot handles force on landing, Yim gave Salto the ability to stick its landings on narrow rods.
They added a system to adjust leg force during the jump and used a flywheel to help with balance, similar to how people swing their arms when they feel off-balance.
To test these ideas, Full’s team measured how real squirrels land. They discovered that squirrels mostly use their front legs, doing a kind of handstand to absorb the impact.
After landing, they use their back legs to twist and stabilize their bodies—either to stop from falling forward or to pull themselves up if they swing underneath the branch.
The robot, although it doesn’t have gripping feet, was still able to copy some of this landing behavior by adjusting leg tension and body position.
Salto’s success could have exciting implications beyond Earth. Yim is working on a NASA project to develop a similar robot that could explore Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.
With much lower gravity than Earth, a robot like Salto could leap the length of a football field in one bound, making it perfect for exploring icy, rough terrain.
This squirrel-inspired robot shows that mixing biology with engineering can lead to some truly powerful and nimble machines.
