Octopus Inspires World's First Soft, Autonomous Robot

This smooth and flexible robot, modeled after an octopus, glows under black light. It took two years to perfect but only a few dollars' worth of materials to produce. An "octobot" less than three inches wide is changing the robotics landscape. The octobot is the world's first completely soft, autonomous, and untethered robot. It is free of wires, batteries, and any hard material--like its namesake, the octopus, which has no internal skeleton.