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The more legs a robot has the better it seems to be at travelling over rough terrain.

at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his colleagues built a range of multi-legged robots from 3D-printed body segments. Each segment had two legs and several motors. The robots had between six and 16 legs in total.

None of the robots had any sensors or cameras so they couldn鈥檛 see their environment and just moved in pre-programmed way that mimicked arthropods. The researchers tested the robots鈥� motion on an obstacle course made of stacks of small cubes, which is standard for assessing how well search-and-rescue robots move in rough environments.

In repeated experiments, robots with fewer legs showed lots of variation in how long they took to move between two points, with some trials taking twice as long as others. Robots with 14 and 16 legs not only navigated more quickly, but their travel time was also similar in different trials. Through mathematical modelling, the team found that robots with more than 10 legs could reliably cover a 60-centimetre distance.

鈥淢any robots could probably make it from some point A to point B, but it鈥檚 hard to prove with certainty that they鈥檒l do that without taking a ton of time. Here, when we increased the number of legs, we saw, and could even mathematically prove, that they鈥檒l for sure make it,鈥� says , also at Georgia Tech, who led the project.

Chong says that many legs repeating many steps breaks up the robot鈥檚 motion, as opposed to the continuous motion of something like a wheel, so the robot wastes less energy on overcoming friction.

While multi-legged robots could eventually deliver aid to disaster sites like collapsed buildings or areas struck by earthquakes, Goldman is trying to adapt them for other tasks as well. His company, , is developing centipede-like robots that could scurry around blueberry or corn fields to help with the monitoring and control of weeds.