Festo’s New Bionic Robots Include Rolling Spider, Flying Fox

The latest in weird and potentially useful robots from German automation giant Festo Photo: Festo We love Festo because every year they invest an entirely appropriate amount of time and money into bio-inspired robots that are totally cool and very functional but have limited usefulness. More often than not, it seems like Festo is able to take some of what it learns from designing and constructing these things and create practical new revenue-generating products. Which is good for them, and means they’ll keep making cool stuff. Over the last few years, we’ve met ants, butterflies, flying jellyfish and penguins, kangaroos, seagulls, and much more.  Festo has just announced its two newest bionic learning network robots—one is a very convincing flying fox, and the other is a walking, tumbling robot inspired by a Saharan spider. Festo calls their BionicFlyingFox an “ultra-lightweight flying object with intelligent kinematics.” It’s 87 centimeters long with a Continue reading Festo’s New Bionic Robots Include Rolling Spider, Flying Fox