US company Pliant Energy Systems has turned one of its green energy technologies into a propulsion system for a swimming robot capable of exploring land and sea.
The Velox robot can move through water as well as over sand, pebbles, snow, ice and other solid ground, completing tasks that robots designed purely for either land or sea would be unsuited to.
Velox's versatility is due to its undulating soft fins, which sit on either side of Velox and move in a hyperbolic pattern reminiscent of a stingray or a millipede.

Pliant Energy originally developed the fins as a system for generating electricity from rivers. It wanted a shape that wouldn't become entangled with debris and or be damaged by bumping up against heavy objects like tree trunks.
"It turns out they are as effective at creating propulsive thrust for swimming robots as they are at capturing the energy flowing through rivers," Pliant CEO and founder Benjamin Pietro Filardo told Dezeen. "To make an analogy, just as an aeroplane propeller is the functional inverse of a wind turbine, the Velox propulsion system is the functional inverse of Pliant's generator."

The fins make Velox efficient and ultra-manoeuvrable. The robot can instantly reverse direction or do a quick turn.
Filardo adds that it is the world's first true ice-skating robot, as it uses anisotropic friction ? the same physics principle that applies to a human skater propelling themselves over ice.

Its amphibious abilities make Velox p...