Robot Roaches With Tiny Magnetic Winch Cooperate to Scale Steps

In a world full of things that are much, much bigger than they are, insects manage to do pretty well with getting around. Some of the most successful insects are the social and cooperative ones, like ants, which can do incredible things such as using their bodies to create structures to get themselves across rivers. In Ron Fearing's lab at UC Berkeley, Carlos Casarez was inspired by behaviors like these to modify some VelociRoACHes to help each other climb up and over obstacles with the aid of an adorable little magnetic tether system. Robots like UC Berkeley's VelociRoACH (Velocity Robotic Autonomous Crawling Hexapod) are, relative to most other robots, very simple and inexpensive to manufacture, with high speed and good maneuverability. They'd be just the thing you might want to send a swarm of into disaster areas to search for survivors, except that they're absolutely terrible at climbing over obstacles.