In the animal kingdom, tails are used to help critters keep their balance even in the most precarious of situations, like say, while flying through the air. Robots can benefit from this idea, using their own automated tails to control their posture while jumping or falling. So when the robots come for you, they’ll be able to ramp some pretty sweet jumps. Check out the video.
It doesn’t look like much now, but it does work. Give the concept a few years to spread around to a few more labs, maybe see some commercial applications, and suddenly we’ll be servo-deep in tailed beast-bots. Our humanoid robots might even have tails.
Robots are becoming strange exponentially these days. Check out that Ballbot article up the in related posts for proof.