London: When our robot overlords come to power, they may not look exactly how you imagined. If Festo has its way, they could look more like unstoppable hopping kangaroos rather than Terminator-styled machines. For the past two years, the German group has been secretly working emulating the jumping behaviour of the kangaroo in robot form.

Getting inspired: The RoboticKangaroo (above) partially ‘charges’ the legs on landing. Its movement is based on that of a real kangaroo (below), which uses its tendons like elastic springs to jump around

It’s one of their most ambitious bio-inspired robots yet and could help improve industrial automation systems that manufacture products such as cars and computers.