Jellyfish swim, birds fly as robots take off

Bold ideas

At the World Robot Conference in Beijing's Daxing district last month, some exhibits resembled scenes from a science fiction movie.

Robots looking like jellyfish bobbed up and down in a water tank, their transparent tentacles floating on the surface.

Named AquaJellies, these robots consist of a transparent hemisphere, a central waterproof body and eight see-through tentacles. A control panel is located in the body, along with intelligent sensors and adaptive systems, to enable the robots to independently determine their movements, and to track their location.

The robotic jellyfish are designed and manufactured by Festo, a German multinational industrial control and automation company, which has produced various types of bionic robot for biological research and development.

"The biggest difficulty in the jellyfish robot is replicating the way a jellyfish moves. By doing this successfully, we can apply this to the 'grabbing' operations of other robots," Liu Fang, Festo's Chinese marketing director, said.