The Amphibious Robotic Turtle (ART) created by researchers at Yale and West Chester universities can shape-shift its limbs and gait to crawl on land and swim in water. ART's four morphable limbs each feature two pneumatic actuators and polymer layers that can be softened by heaters, boosting their cross-sectional area by up to four times.
The turtle bot performed three times better than a bipedal robot developed by the MIT in terms of the cost of transport, which quantifies the amount of energy expended when moving between two points. ART could be helpful in ocean farming and environmental monitoring, or could transport parts or tools from land into the water to divers working on repairing a submerged structure.
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