A nimble robot inspired by bush babies can now bounce three times its own height in a single leap. SALTO (saltatorial locomotion terrain obstacles) was fist designed to jump at 4mph (1.75 m/s) but a host of new features have now been added to the nifty machine. A single leg, inspired by those of the galago, or Senegalese bush baby, propels the robot across a range of terrain and over various obstacles. Video footage of it in action reveals how it effortlessly navigates obstacle courses and bounces through the streets. Creators of SALTO hope the technology will one day aid the development of other robots which can assist in rescue missions by jumping over rubble.

Salto stands for Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles, saltatorial being a Latin-derivded word meaning related to or adapted for leaping. This latest iteration of the robot is called Salto-1P and is specifically designed to hop between designated spots, as if jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone or playing hopscotch.

Day by day, human beings grow more and more inadequate. They can burn us in a foot race. And they can even read our damn minds. Now a little robot from the University of California Berkeley is putting on a jumping clinic. Meet Salto, the bot that not only leaps four times higher than its height--higher than you could ever manage--but strings together multiple jumps and bounds off walls in the process.

Last December, Duncan Haldane (whose research on incredibly agile bioinspired robots we've featured extensively in the past) ended up on the cover of the inaugural issue of Science Robotics with his jumping robot, Salto. Salto had impressive vertical jumping agility, and was able to jump from the ground onto a vertical surface, and then use that surface to change its direction with a second jump. It was very cool to watch, but the jumping was open-loop and planar, meaning that two jumps in a row was just about all that Salto could manage. Haldane mentioned to us in December that future work on Salto could include chaining together multiple jumps, and in a paper just accepted to the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), he and co-author Justin Yim at UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, led by Professor Ronald Fearing, show the improvements that they've made over the last six months. Thanks to some mechanical fine-tuning and the clever addition of a pair of thrusters, the new Salto-1P is jumping longer, faster, and higher than ever.

A new primate-inspired robot has a feature that is leaps and bounds above the rest. Scientists from U.C. Berkeley invented a one legged robot named Salto -- short for'Saltatorial Locomotion Terrain Obstacles' -- that can jump higher than any other untethered robot. In a Science Robotics study, the team said Salto can jump at a rate of 1.75 meters (or almost 6 feet) per second, a rate 56 percent better than all other jumping bots. The team created Salto after watching search and rescue workers maneuver through rubble. "Our goal was to have a search and rescue robot small enough not to disturb the rubble further," Duncan Haldane, roboticist and co-inventor of Salto, said in a press conference, and to "move quickly across the many kinds of rubble produced by collapsed buildings."

Named SALTO and developed in California, the machine stands just about 10 inches tall, but can jump straight up from a crouch to over three feet high. Not only that, the robotic critter-- made with an eye towards someday helping with search and rescue operations-- can execute a parkour-like move and jump off the ground, then off a wall. Duncan Haldane, first author on a study about the new robot and a PhD candidate at University of California, Berkeley, said his team was inspired to make SALTO after talking with first responders at an urban rescue training site. "Our goal was to have a search and rescue robot small enough to not disturb the rubble further, [and] move quickly across the many kinds of rubble produced by collapsed buildings," he said during a teleconference on Monday. "To do that, it has to be able to jump."

In the future, flocks of small, one-footed robots may bound across areas too dangerous for humans to traverse, carrying out search and rescue operations. They'll be able to leap across rubble like monopodal kangaroos. Today, their predecessor prototype tends to fall over after most jumps. The landing needs work, but the jumps themselves are impressive. The robot, SALTO, can leap up to a meter into the air.

The history of robotics is littered with inspiration from animals. Called biomimicry, it has often been used by scientists to solve complex structural and design problems. In a new related development, researchers from University of California, Berkeley, designed a small robot, which has "the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded." Known as Salto (short for saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles), the robot is 10.2 inches tall when fully extended and can jump up to 1 meter (almost 3.3 feet), which is more than three times its full height. Its development was inspired by galago, a small African primate known for its jumping ability.

Meet SALTO: a powerful new wall-jumping robot built by researchers at UC Berkeley. According to SALTO's makers, the diminutive, one-legged hopper not only has the "highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded," but also the ability to link together multiple jumps in quick succession. SALTO stands for saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles, and the motion of the mechanical jumping leg was modeled after galagos -- small jumping primates native to Africa that have stretchy tendons in their legs that allow them to store energy and jump with more force than if they only used their leg muscles alone. The galago is so agile not only because it can make a big leap, but also because it can essentially wind up its legs into a crouched position in mid-flight and immediately leap again upon landing. At just 100 grams and 26 centimeters (10.2 inches) tall when fully extended, SALTO can jump a little bit more than one meter (3.3 feet) high in a single leap.

WASHINGTON Inspired by the remarkable jumping ability of an African primate called a galago, scientists have fashioned a small robot with unique leaping capabilities they hope can someday be used in tricky search-and-rescue situations. The scientists said on Tuesday they had built a robot, dubbed Salto, with vertical jumping agility like no other machine, able to leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps consecutively. In designing mobile robots, researchers sometimes mimic the way animals move. In this case, the researchers sought to create a robot that might need to hurdle impediments as it traverses difficult terrain like the rubble of a building wrecked by an earthquake. To design Salto, short for "saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles," the University of California, Berkeley, researchers sought inspiration from one of the animal kingdom's best leapers.