Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University have developed a working prototype of a robot that realigns its body to maneuver through tiny cracks to gather data.
“[The Federal Emergency Management Agency] told us there was a niche for small, first-responder robots that can go deep into rubble piles,” says Robert J. Full, professor of integrated biology at Berkeley, who worked on the project. “We built it and called it CRAM, for ‘compressible robot with articulated mechanisms.’ ”