This little bot is the Aquapod from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Distributed Robotics. Aquapod’s designed to tumble on land and at the bottoms of bodies of water like some species of flailing cybernetic horseshoe crab.
Each of these waterproof robots costs $US2000 to build. Aquapod’s creators hope to someday equip the robot with solar cells and autonomous programming so this quirky machine can monitor underwater ecosystems unsupervised.
[University of Minnesota via Automaton]