The human hand is a marvel of evolutionary development, offering 27 degrees of freedom and unrivaled touch sensitivity. But it's the same aspects that make our hands so, well, handy, that also make them an absolute nightmare to recreate robotically. That's why one team of researchers has abandoned human-derived gripper design in favor of woodlice. Look, at least they're not the desiccated and re-inflated tarantula corpses that a team of Rice University researchers created in 2022. Those manipulators were a novel proof of concept in that they exploited the natural mechanisms spiders use for locomotion -- specifically that their limbs move through a combination of fluid pressure and flexor muscles, rather than the antagonistic pairs that mammals have -- though the system was really only good for as long as the corpses held together.

Robots could use living invertebrates as grippers to help them pick up awkward objects or grasp things underwater. "We don't mean it as a replacement for robotics, but as a kind of new direction or new way to do both biology and robotics," says Josephine Galipon at Tohoku University in Japan. But others have questioned how useful or ethical this approach is. Researchers have previously experimented with using live insects to control entire robots or even using whole dead spiders as robotic grippers. Galipon and her colleagues have now made grippers using pill bugs – a kind of woodlouse – and chitons – marine molluscs that can stick firmly to rocks, like a limpet.