The jumper presented with a hybrid spring in a stable pre-jump configuration. credit: Elliot W Hawkes

When engineers want to design robots capable of navigating complex real-world environments, they often turn to the animal kingdom.  Such biomimicry has created bots that run like dogs or cheetahs or hop like flying birds in flight.  But now researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara have reached new heights, bypassing the constraints of the biological model.  His 30-centimeter long jumper can jump more than 30 meters in the air—about the height of a 10-story building and 100 times its own height.

  This anti-gravity display is many heads and shoulders from the distance any living creature can reach.  U.C.  A mechanical engineer, Elliot W.  "The best animal jumper [called a squirrel-sized primate] is the galago, which has been measured to jump about 2.3 meters high from a standstill," Hawks says.  Santa Barbara and lead author of a study detailing the Superjumper project.  He says the device also stands out in the mechanical zone, where combustion has previously launched jumpers to a height of eight meters and compressed gas propelled them to reach 10 metres.  "It jumps a lot more than the rest of the jumping robots in the world—if not all of them I'm aware of," says Sarah Bergbreiter, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University.  new study but wrote an accompanying commentary about it.