We are used to bots mimicking humans, and animals, but there is plenty of life beyond the constraints of legged bodies that can inspire useful machines. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University have made a machine with long tendrils that can perform dangerous tasks like reaching through rubble to pump air to a trapped earthquake survivor. In a new study in the journal Science Robotics, researchers Elliot W. Hawkes, Laura H. Blumenschein, Joseph D. Greer, and Allison M. Okamura demonstrate a robot that travels through space like a living thing, but that is perhaps best thought of as a fast-growing, useful, mechanical plant, which unfurls from a single immobile foot. The robot's design is explicitly plant-inspired. "I remember watching an English ivy plant," says Hawke, "over the course of months, grow around the corner of my bookshelf seeking the sunlight and thinking that in a certain, very slow way, it was going somewhere."