This jumping robot leaps to new heights

A new primate-inspired robot has a feature that is leaps and bounds above the rest. Scientists from U.C. Berkeley invented a one legged robot named Salto -- short for'Saltatorial Locomotion Terrain Obstacles' -- that can jump higher than any other untethered robot. In a Science Robotics study, the team said Salto can jump at a rate of 1.75 meters (or almost 6 feet) per second, a rate 56 percent better than all other jumping bots. The team created Salto after watching search and rescue workers maneuver through rubble. "Our goal was to have a search and rescue robot small enough not to disturb the rubble further," Duncan Haldane, roboticist and co-inventor of Salto, said in a press conference, and to "move quickly across the many kinds of rubble produced by collapsed buildings."