A robot that's a real softie: 'Squishy' Octobot can slip through cracks and tight spaces like a real octopus and costs just 'pennies' to make

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 octobot is an entirely soft, autonomous robot. A pneumatic network, pink, is embedded within the octobot's body and hyperelastic actuator arms, light blue.