Centipede robots with more legs are better at walking over bumps

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

Baxi Chong 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’t see their environment and just moved in pre-programmed way that mimicked arthropods. The researchers tested …