Back in March, I blogged about the discovery of the first bipedal octopus — a cephalopod that tucked six of its legs up into a ball and walked on its remaining two like a human, apparently to psych out its predators. Apparently one of the discoverers was Bob Full, a roboticist famous for studying the gaits of everything from cockroaches to humans, in an attempt to perfect robotic walking.

Now, according to a story in the BBC, the bipedal octopi are inspiring Full to examine the idea of using stretchy octopus arms as a paradigm for robotics. The octobot would have no rigid form at all — it’d be a series of connected artificial muscles that can expand or contract in unison. Thus, it could perform some of the classic tricks of our invertebrate friends:

With no hard parts, the creature can squeeze through tiny spaces.

“That’s the advantage of soft robotics,” he added.

“Can you imagine how wonderful it would be to function as a search and rescue robot, to be able to go into areas - after an earthquake, after a car accident, during a fire - and move into spaces that no other robot could get into.”

To recap: The first hydrostatically bipedal octopus ever discovered is now inspiring the design of cephalopodic robotics. Man, I can now die happy after having written that sentence.

(Thanks to John T. Unger for this one! I also totally stole the title to this entry from Grist Magazine.)