I started out the morning at a symposium on the future of internet searching, but the discussion of institutional repositories and language translation algorithms was a bit dry, and I soon headed down the hall for a guaranteed thrill: “Robots – Our future’s sustainable partner”.

Perfect timing – I got there just before University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Full started his talk. Full designs robots that mimic animals of all sorts, and can always be counted upon for cool slow motion videos of insects flying or geckos climbing walls. This time he had a fun video of a cockroach on a treadmill (“The American cockroach,” he explained. “The one that you don’t think you have in your house.”) and a robotic crab playing in the surf, to name but a few.

Full also had a live demonstration of StickyBot – a gecko-like robot with bright orange feet designed to crawl up a glass window. Unfortunately, StickyBot seemed to suffer from stage fright, and kept slipping off the glass.

But despite his push for biomimicry, Full says he isn’ t trying to achieve exact biological replicas, and he won’t be copying evolutionary processes to optimize his designs. Evolution, he said, is a tinkerer without a defined goal, but engineers have finite endgames in mind.

And, he added, robots don’t always have to be as complex as the animals they’re modeled after. The legs of his robot crab, for example, had only two joint motions as compared to the biological crab’s nine. “Crabs do a lot of other things,” he said. “They fight with one another, they mate with one another.

“Robots don’t do that… yet.”