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Shape-Shifting Robotic "Slugs" Could One Day Crawl Across Alien Worlds

Robots have been a mainstay of our early space exploration efforts. But they normally have wheels. Or in some cases, rotors. While those solutions are great on flat ground, they struggle with jagged boulders or tight crevices. So engineers have been working on alternative robotic form factors, and a recent paper in Nature Machine Intelligence from researchers at Colorado State University’s Adaptive Robotics Lab, describes a unique morphology using a design principle typically seen in architecture rather than robotics - tensegrity.

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