14 DAY TRIAL // You'd think that a robot inspired by a sea turtle would be used to explore underwater environments or stuff like that, but that's not the case for the “FlipperBot” invented by engineers from Georgia Tech and Northwestern University.
That's not even the strangest thing in my book. I find it weirder that a robot inspired by baby turtles looks like a scorpion from above.
It's all the fault of that blasted tail (really the power cabling). From the side, FlipperBot even looks like a weird rodent.
Moreover, the FlipperBot can crawl through sand, or more like pull itself forwards, much like a turtle drags itself on the beach, but water will kill it, like most electronics.
Since sea turtles can traverse both firm terrain and sand fairly easily, the robot tries to reproduce the mechanics.
The key was understanding the flexible wrist of baby sea turtles, which allows them to move forward just enough to avoid letting the sand flow around the limbs and slow them down.
There are, of course, a bunch of possible scientific uses, which have been noted here.