Now, 'soft' Robot Octopus that's as adept at swimming as natural counterpart

Scientists have developed a soft "Robot Octopus" that is not only capable of swimming swiftly, but is also capable of carrying objects in its tentacles and crawling.

The robot, proposed by researchers from Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Greece, possesses the same physical features and characteristics of a real octopus and experiments have shown that the mechanical cephalopod has not been attacked till now by any other animal when it swam freely in the Aegean Sea.

The researchers, who were earlier working on adding a web between their tentacles, have reported that the addition of a soft and supple silicone web has nearly doubled the speed of the roboctopus.

The non-living octopus that could earlier go100 millimeters per second with arms only has been able to go upto 180mm/s with the attachment of the web, while its overall cost of transport (CoT) has dropped from 0.85 to 0.62.

The researchers said that there is a bunch of little fish following the robot octopus around quite happily and also suggested that the robot might therefore make a good platform to observe ocean life without disturbing it too much.