Water-pumping robot worms its way over rugged coastal terrain

What happened

Water-pumping robot worms its way over rugged coastal terrain, according to New Atlas Robotics. Biomimicry involves borrowing ideas from nature to solve engineering problems. This is what one of the research teams at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering specializes in.

Exploring or inspecting a coastline, however, is a completely different story. It involves dealing with very diverse terrain: going over rocks, climbing slopes, sliding into the water, and getting back out.

This is a pretty complex task, at least for existing robots. That’s exactly what the NYU Tandon researchers came up with: WorMa.

The name WorMa combines “worm” and “mass,” and the robot tackles its challenge with a pretty smart mechanism. The device looks like a giant worm, with five connected segments and four joints.

It measures 50 cm (19.7 in) long and weighs just over 1 kilogram (2.2 lb). The really interesting part is that almost one third of its weight sits in two latex water balloons – one in its head and one in its tail. A pump in the middle section moves those 300 grams (10.6 oz) of water between the head and the tail, shifting the robot’s center of mass depending on where it needs to go.