A multi-institutional trio of roboticists has designed and built a robot that mimics the abilities of the dung beetle. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Science, Binggwong Leung, Stanislav Gorb and Poramate Manoonpong outline their reasons for building it and describe how well it worked when tested.

To build their robot, the team started with stick insect designs. They then modified them in ways that mimicked the dung beetle. Then, instead of using machine learning to teach the robot what to do, as is done with many other modern robots, the researchers used a modular, neural-based, loco-manipulation control approach based on just two behaviors—pitch and roll for the upper two pairs of legs and simple biomechanics for the lower pair. The result was a robot they call ALPHA.