By Peter Weiss
Rush Robinett got the idea for his lab’s new robot while out on his father’s New Mexico farm. He was catching grasshoppers for trout bait and noticed that when he reached for the grasshoppers, they seemed to spring in random directions. They fell on their sides as they landed and then struggled back onto their feet before springing again.
A robot designer at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, Robinett realized that this kind of grasshopper mobility might be just the thing for developing new kinds of small, mobile robots. Program managers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in Arlington Va., had been interested in creating wide-ranging minirobots for years.