JOLLBOT: Rhodri Armour designed Jollbot as part of his PhD thesis.
© NIC DELVES-BROUGHTON, UNIVERSITY OF BATH

The spherical Jollbot doesn't resemble a grasshopper, but it owes its ability to jump to these tiny creatures. Insects don't have the muscle action to hop like kangaroos, so they store energy like a compressed spring and release it suddenly to leap. Likewise, when the flexible Jollbot is flattened and then released, it bounds upward roughly 20 inches (50 centimeters) into the air.

Jollbot is an example of a biomimetic machine—one that borrows ideas from nature as inspiration for its appearance, behavior and physical mechanisms. Biomimicry, or biomimetic design, is nothing new (think: Leonardo da Vinci's gliders based on bird wings). But engineers and roboticists are now "proactively looking toward nature for solutions to specific engineering issues," says Jollbot's designer, Rhodri Armour, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in England.

Armour, who did his doctoral work at Bath's Center for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies (created in 2003), sought a mechanism that would allow a bot to explore rough environments, which hinder walking and wheeled devices. After four years and three versions of the machine, he unveiled Jollbot in December. In addition to jumping, when it's beach ball–like body is fully extended and taut, the device can roll along bumpy terrain. Picture it on Mars, where a robot like Jollbot could roll and bounce over areas that wheel and tread-based NASA rovers could not.

Over the past decade, biomimetic design has thrived, according to Mark Cutkosky, co-director of Stanford University's Center for Design Research. Biologists have better tools—such as advanced microscopy for viewing things on the scale of thousandths of nanometers—that allow them to learn more about animals and their physical mechanisms, he says. Ronald Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist, notes a dramatic drop in costs of building robots for his research: Making a bot now costs around $1,000 per unit, rather than $30,000.

Meanwhile, new technologies allow engineers to dream beyond designing glorified mechanical arms: So-called "swarm bots" work together like army ants to move relatively heavy objects; a fire hose–cum-snake robot can slither across the floor before putting out a blaze; and Nissan is developing an avoidance system to prevent car crashes based on bees—which use their compound eyes to see nearly all the way around themselves while buzzing about, changing direction when they sense something in their path.