With this award, Kramer will create the first morphing robotic limb capable of matching its configuration and stiffness to its environment.

She credits her inspiration for the idea to biological sea turtles and terrestrial tortoises.

Sea turtles have flippers for swimming, stability control, and maneuvering, whereas tortoises have legs for support of the body and movement on land.

Our limb design will allow movement in both environments while permitting functionality in the tidal zone.

Her previous honors and awards include being named to Forbes 30 under 30 list, and receiving the NSF CAREER Award, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, and the AFOSR Young Investigator Award.

Conversely, tortoises move fine on land and but are far less efficient swimmers.

Fortunately for both, neither leave their native terrain very often.

For many Navy vehicles and devices, though, land-to-water capabilities are crucial.

The three distinct environmental conditions of the shoreline - stable open water, turbulent surf zones, and dry land are particularly tricky for robotic systems to navigate.

To make the transformation from the tortoise-like phase of the robotic limb (nearly circular in cross-section to provide support for walking) to the flattened shape of the turtles flipper, Kramer will use materials that can change in stiffness to lock and unlock into the two configurations.

Distributing these actuators along a limb will allow us to morph between the flipper and leg configurations, Kramer said.

Distributing actuation, sensing and variable stiffness throughout the entire limb structure is one of the goals for this project.

As Kramer notes, soft and reconfigurable robots that mimic systems in nature have the potential to operate in the kinds of environments that spell trouble for traditional robots.

Not only would the system have more control than traditional robots in the varying environments, they would also operate using less power.

Potential applications would include payload delivery, mine-detection and disposal, surveillance, environmental monitoring and diver support.

She and her team will also visit more zoos and aquariums, possibly observing turtles and tortoises in transitional zones to watch how they crawl up onto land, or dive back into the water.

With research thats supported by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intel, Kramers team is uniquely positioned to address the challenges associated with soft, biomimetic robots from a materials and manufacturing perspective.

The Turtles Rebecca