Engineers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed a robot that can alter its shape.

The insect-inspired CLARI, which stands for Compliant Legged Articulated Robotic Insect, is a tethered "squishable” robot that can passively change shape for applications such as squeezing through narrow gaps.

Source: University of Colorado, Boulder

Although CLARI currently possesses four legs, its developers expect that future iterations of CLARI will be easily customizable, and potentially outfitted with as many as eight legs at once as well as mixing and matching different types of appendages.

While still in the early design stages, the University of Colorado at Boulder engineers envision that CLARI — which can shift itself from 1.3 inches wide in its square shape to about 0.8 inches wide in its elongated shape — will be tether-less and used to explore the inside of jet engines for inspection purposes or collapsed buildings to assist first responders.

CLARI is detailed in the article, Design of CLARI: A Miniature Modular Origami Passive Shape‐Morphing Robot, which appears in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems.

For more on CLARI, watch the accompanying video that appears courtesy of the University of Colorado at Boulder.