Sometimes, smaller is better, especially with robots. That's what researchers developing mini-robots have in mind. Robots that cost 10 to 100 are cheaper to make and more useful to deploy in emergency situations than big robots with limited mobility. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are developing sophisticated robots that are up to 10 centimeters long, and can run, climb, fly, and communicate with emergency personnel. Once the multi-leg robots serve their purpose, they can be disposed of without regrets.

Sometimes, smaller is better, especially with robots. That's what researchers developing mini-robots have in mind. Robots that cost US 10 to 100 are cheaper to make and more useful to deploy in emergency situations than big robots with limited mobility. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are developing sophisticated robots that are up to 10 centimeters long, and can run, climb, fly, and communicate with emergency personnel. Once the multi-leg robots serve their purpose, they can be disposed of without any regrets.

It gets by, with a little help from its inanimate friends. Cooperation is an evolutionary advantage. While many creatures are perfectly comfortable spending most of their time alone, creatures that work together are capable of far more than their individual components working separately. It should come as no surprise, then, that when researchers make animal-inspired robots, they design them to work together, as a team. Created by the University of California, Berkeley, the VelociRoACH is a small, fast, insect-imitating little machine.

In a world full of things that are much, much bigger than they are, insects manage to do pretty well with getting around. Some of the most successful insects are the social and cooperative ones, like ants, which can do incredible things such as using their bodies to create structures to get themselves across rivers. In Ron Fearing's lab at UC Berkeley, Carlos Casarez was inspired by behaviors like these to modify some VelociRoACHes to help each other climb up and over obstacles with the aid of an adorable little magnetic tether system. Robots like UC Berkeley's VelociRoACH (Velocity Robotic Autonomous Crawling Hexapod) are, relative to most other robots, very simple and inexpensive to manufacture, with high speed and good maneuverability. They'd be just the thing you might want to send a swarm of into disaster areas to search for survivors, except that they're absolutely terrible at climbing over obstacles.