Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.

University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers are trying to remedy that situation. Based on studies of the biomechanics of squirrel leaps and landings, they have designed a hopping robot that can stick a landing on a narrow perch.