The Freakiest Robot Animals In The World

Why build an entirely new robot when you can just copy nature?

That's the idea behind biomimicry, or engineering robots that imitate lifeforms. For example, when scientists are trying to find ways to propel an aquatic robot through water or give an airborne robot flight, they might look to animals like jellyfish or hummingbirds for answers.

To give you a taste of this brave new animal kingdom, we rounded up the nine wildest animal-inspired robots. BigDog ain't got nothin' on this pack.

The Spy Nautilus
 John Downer's television series "Dolphins: Spy In The Pod" used a bevy of sea-life-imitating robots to track fast-moving dolphin pods. The strangest of these? The "Spy Nautilus," a robot sea mollusk with cameras behind its eyes. According to the Daily Mirror, a curious pod surrounded the robot, "revealing to the camera in close-up a tiny five-day-old calf, still wrinkled from birth."

The Roboroach

Backyard Brains

Neuroscience education startup Backyard Brains sells "the first commercially available cyborg," or kits that enable you to make a cockroach remote-controllable by implanting electrodes in its antennae. Human operators can "drive" these cockroaches, turning them right and left with a smartphone app, for a few hours until the cockroaches become desensitized to the electrodes. The technology attracted critics like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which argued that the app was "encouraging kids to torture bugs." Apple and Google have since removedRoboroach from their respective app stores.

Harvard's Robobees

Micro Air Vehicles Project

All over the world, honeybees are dying, and farmers are in danger of losing one of their primary sources of pollination. Could robot honeybees step in to help? The Harvard Microrobotics Lab is betting on it. Their bees are made of laser-cut layers of carbon fiber titanium, brass, ceramic and plastic sheeting, and they weigh stunningly little: Sixty-three bees about equal the mass of one U.S. quarter. Sadly, the robot beesstill can't make honey.

The Hummingbird Nano Air Vehicle

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which commissions research for the Department of Defense, has a history of making crazy robots -- but we think this cyborg hummingbird may take the cake. Weighing less than an AA battery, the Hummingbird Nano Air Vehicle could be used to scout danger zones unobtrusively, relaying live video back to soldiers positioned a safe distance away.

WildCat

It's a four-legged robot running right at you! WildCat, funded by DARPA and built by the robot-makers at Google-owned Boston Dynamics, is a third-generation quadruped, succeeding the company's earlier four-legged robots, BigDog andCheetah. Like Cheetah, WildCat is maneuverable, and like BigDog, it doesn't require a tether. But unlike BigDog, WildCat can reach a stunning 16 miles per hour when running.