THE octopus is the inspiration for a project to build the world’s first soft-bodied robot (see “Robot octopus will go where no sub has gone before”). They have no skeleton, just a hard beak, which means they can squeeze themselves into the smallest spaces. They are extremely smart too. Given their extraordinary abilities, the only wonder is that it’s taken so long to come up with the idea of a fully fledged roboctopus. With other marine biomimetic projects on the go, such as the robotuna, jellyfish and manta ray, the robo-aquarium can only be a matter of time.
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