Meet Octobot, a robot that's a real softie, and cheap

The latest revolutionary robot isn't the metallic, costly machine you'd expect: It's squishy like Silly Putty, wireless, battery-less and made for pennies by a 3-D printer. It looks like a tiny octopus and is designed to mimic that slithery creature to get through cracks and tight places, making it ideal as a rescue robot. A team at Harvard University has created a robot -- actually about 300 of them, since they are so cheap to make -- that is opposite of the common view of a robot. The discovery is described, photographed and on video in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday. "It's sort of a hybrid between octopus and robot," said study author Jennifer Lewis, a Harvard professor of biologically inspired engineering.