Robots fashioned from dead lobster exoskeletons have awesome strength, light weight, and flexibility — necrobotics advance mixes sustainable food waste with synthetic components

Swiss scientists have used dead lobster parts as robotic appendages. The strong yet flexible and lightweight exoskeletons of these marine animals have been successfully demonstrated as robotic manipulators, grippers, and swimmers or flappers flexing at up to 8 Hz. The use of dead animal parts makes this an advance in ‘necrobotics.’ This example of bio-hydrid robotics, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is particularly sustainable necro-tech, as it uses crustacean…