The European Research Council has awarded a €2 million ERC Consolidator Grant to Ahmad Rafsanjani, professor of soft robotics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), for his project “METABOA: Exploring the Unexplored with a Crawling Soft Robot.” The project aims to develop snake-inspired soft robots capable of navigating complex and unknown terrains by learning from frictional cues — a breakthrough that could open new possibilities for exploration in environments ranging from collapsed structures to planetary surfaces.
Press release by European Research Council, SDU, and Ministry of Higher Education and Science.