Yep, this is exactly what you think it is. The forest fire prevention robot by Jordan Guelde is an advanced robot designed to clear large areas of foliage from around a forest fire to help stop the flames from spreading. Traditional back burning would certainly be cheaper and possibly less lethal to surrounding wildlife, but complete with and array of hubless motors, and integrated fuel system of its back this robot is a hell of a lot cooler.

Designer: Jordan Guelde

I remember being a typically angry punk growing up in Miami and admiring graffiti artists with the ability to reach seemingly impossible heights to express their teenage angst with the world. What death defying lengths they must have gone through to tag their alter-ego names on the underside of a bridge or any other impossible to reach potential canvas. They were my super heros growing up and to this day, I am still not sure how they managed to pull off these feats of high flying wizardry.

Designer: Stefan Rechsteiner

The C-Bot may be peering thru your office window soon. Based on biomimetics, it uses a gecko’s innovative foot design as a template to climb walls without any artificial adhesion. Tho it may not look like it, a gecko’s foot is hairy, fine enough to only be seen on the micro level. This molecular adhesion, combined with C-Bot’s array of ultrasonic sensors means costly (and ugly) scaffolding may be obsolete. Theoretically you can build them big enough to carry a human. Now wouldn’t that be something!

Designer: Niklas Galler

There are some new bots called OSP on the drawing board. Using advance robotics, these guys autonomously work together to contain an oil spill by surrounding it with an inflatable barrier. Once contained, clean-up crews can jump in and suck the oil out. After reading this, my Roomba just quit.

Designer: Ji-hoon Kim