A wrong landing could be all it takes to break a robot. To protect our robot friends from their inevitable falls, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are creating customizable shock-absorbent padding. The team's "Programmable Viscoelastic Material" (PVM) technique allows users to digitally program every part of a 3D-printed object to exact levels of stiffness and elasticity. "We can make really effective dampers and those dampers can be tailored exactly to the application by controlling the amount of liquid and solid," one of the researchers, Robert MacCurdy, told Quartz. Although viscoelastics like rubber and plastic are cheap, compact, and readily available, they can prove hard to customize to specific levels of damping, which can reduce the rebound after impact.