A soft robot that can crawl across surfaces and under obstacles has been created by a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based team led by chemist George Whitesides of Harvard University,

Inspired by starfish, squid and worms, their squishy four-armed creation lacks any kind of skeleton. Instead, air is pumped through valves and tubes made of elastomeric polymers to one of five pneumatic sections.

The rise of the soft robots could find new applications in areas where their variety of gaits and relatively cheapness serves as an advantage, such as in tasks that require delicate actions: Whitesides has already demonstrated that similar pneumatic devices can be used to pick things up.