Meet the Octobot

According to the Harvard researchers who created it, it's the first soft robot that is completely self-contained. It has no hard electronic components--no batteries or computer chips--and moves without being tethered to a computer. The alternating release of gas is what makes the bot do what looks like a little dance, wiggling its tentacles up and down and moving around in the process. The octobot can move for about eight minutes on one milliliter of fuel. So how do you even build something like this? "You have to make all the parts yourself," says Ryan Truby, a graduate student in Jennifer Lewis's lab at Harvard, where the materials half of this research is taking place.