I'm Nate from Design Squad.

Today, I'm visiting Blake from Rise Robotics.

Blake!

Hey, nice to meet you.

Good to meet you.

What are you guys doing?

We make muscles, we make springs, we make all sorts of stuff that works like the human body.

I understand there's a term for this, right?

Biomimetics.

Biomimetics?

Biomimetics means, to copy nature.

It means to take what we see in nature and to do it ourselves for our own use and for our own good.

Blake and Arron and Toomas are the three guys behind Rise Robotics, and they're a company of engineers, kind of like me, who just want to build cool stuff.

I like things that kind of go "Boom!"

and, you know, are really fast and energetic and fun.

It's meant to make you feel superhuman.

That's what it's really all about.

Yes!

BLAKE: This one is called the Bounders, and essentially it kind of acts like a giant Achilles tendon, which is the biggest spring in the body.

The biggest spring in the body.

Did you even know your body has springs?

Which one is my Achilles tendon?

So looking at the anatomy, we have the calf muscle, which connects to the tibia, and we have the Achilles tendon, which connects the calf muscle to the heel bone.

We can bounce with just the tendon.

So the tendon, in this case, is bouncing.

It's expanding and shrinking back down again, but the calf muscle really isn't changing any length at all, which is why you don't feel tired.

You've just got to use the springs.

What's the material?

This one is made of fiberglass.

It's a very springy, very resilient material that is designed to give a lot of energy and not be very massive, not have much weight.

My pole vaulting poles are made out of fiberglass for the same reasons, I guess.

BLAKE: Pole vaulting is awesome.

I love anything that involves really springy stuff that flies high into the air.

We have a few videos of the Bounders in action.

It's Arron who's doing the running.

He's having a blast right now.

NATE: Dude, you look like a super hero.

How big is that stride, do you think?

It was close to nine feet.

NATE: It's like augmenting your body to work even better, but in the same way that nature made it work.

Pretty cool.

We're calling this the Cyclone, and it's essentially a robotic muscle.

So it pulls between these two points that you're holding onto, and it pulls really hard and really fast, just like a regular human muscle does.

That's where its inspiration comes from.

NATE: Can I arm wrestle it?

BLAKE: You can try.

So this might be used to put into somebody else's invention to have practical applications.

It's really strong.

BLAKE: We have 70 pounds of weight in this bucket that our muscle's going to lift and move up and down.

NATE: These are really, really cheap motors.

You'd find these in a hair dryer or, like, a really cheap electric drill.

So they hardly cost anything.

BLAKE: And that's actually the key point here, is that the motors themselves are very cheap.

What's hard is to take that power from the motor and turn it into something useful.

And the really cool thing about it is that they're 3D printing the parts to make them.

That means just like a printer where you hit "Print" and your document comes out on a piece of paper, instead of that, we get to print parts.

So this little machine right here is currently making a new Cyclone.

Take a look around you and check out some of the awesome ways that nature has solved some of its problems.

I bet you'll find some great ideas for how you could build some cool stuff, too.