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Run for the hills, the robots are coming!
Found this one on YouTube after looking into the work done at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).
They came to my attention via an eye-snagging story on EDN, our American sister site - Robotic grasshopper leaps as high as 27 times its height. The researchers in Switzerland have apparently built a 5cm-tall robot, based on grasshoppers and locusts, that can jump as high as 1.4m.
The non-sentient being uses a 0.6g pager motor to slowly charge two torsion springs and then explosively release that energy.
The device's battery, it says, can power 320 jumps at 3-sec intervals).
You can see a video related to their work below. Interesting stuff, but with a slightly sinister undertow!
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