Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology took inspiration from the unique movement of centipedes to revolutionize robotics. Researchers have found that robots with duplicate legs can navigate uneven surfaces without the need for additional sensory or control technologies.

The team believes this innovation could find broad applications in agriculture, space exploration and search and rescue operations. Researchers have developed a theory called spatial redundancy, which suggests that adding pairs of legs to a robot increases the robot’s ability to move steadily on complex surfaces. This means that even if one foot fails, the multiple feet allow the job to keep moving and reliably transport objects.

The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the need for multiple sensors to control the robot in real time. In applications such as search and rescue operations or the exploration of environments such as Mars where sensors can be expensive, fragile, or unable to respond quickly to rapidly changing conditions, a sensorless robot with an excessive number of legs provides a practical solution.

Experiments conducted by the research group confirmed the effectiveness of the theory.