More than a lab animal [Back Story]

Sometimes, typically while she was chopping up anchovies or adjusting a water tank's pH levels, a thought occurred to Cecilia Laschi: Nothing in her engineering education or professional life had prepared her for duty as an ad hoc aquarist. Laschi [above], a professor of biorobotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, arrived at that unusual juncture through her work on "soft" robotics. She wanted to build supple robots that could bend and move like animals, imagining machines that could maneuver through complicated environments and safely interact with live soft-bodied creatures. In 2006 she decided that the ultraflexible octopus was "the perfect model:" for her work and began a long quest to design robotic replicas [see "Octo-Bot," in this issue].