{"id":229833,"date":"2026-01-26T17:09:58","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T23:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/meet-the-soft-humanoid-robot-that-can-grow-shrink-fly-and-walk-on-water"},"modified":"2026-01-26T17:09:58","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T23:09:58","slug":"meet-the-soft-humanoid-robot-that-can-grow-shrink-fly-and-walk-on-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/meet-the-soft-humanoid-robot-that-can-grow-shrink-fly-and-walk-on-water","title":{"rendered":"Meet the soft humanoid robot that can grow, shrink, fly and walk on water"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/meet-the-soft-humanoid-robot-that-can-grow-shrink-fly-and-walk-on-water3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Humanoid robots look impressive and have enormous potential to change our daily lives, but they still have a reputation for being clunky. They\u2019re also heavy and stiff, and if they fall, they can easily break and injure people around them.<\/p>\n<p>But that could be about to change. Researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Shenzhen have unveiled a <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2024-06-chinese-robot-road-uncanny-valley.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">soft humanoid robot<\/a> that can change its size, squeeze through spaces, and even walk on water. The key to this outstanding flexibility is a system the team developed called GrowHR. The research, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/sciadv.aea2831\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Science Advances<\/i>, describes how the robot was inspired by the way human bones develop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Humanoid robots look impressive and have enormous potential to change our daily lives, but they still have a reputation for being clunky. They\u2019re also heavy and stiff, and if they fall, they can easily break and injure people around them. But that could be about to change. Researchers at the Southern University of Science and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}