Watch: A cockroach-inspired robot that can't be squashed; withstands 1 million times its weight

Nature has inspired some of the best robots; innovations in robotics are bringing us synchronized swarms of robot fish, and drones with flapping dragonfly-like wings.

Engineers have now created a little, scurrying bot modelled on the common cockroach that has nearly the same speed and squash ability as its biological counterpart.

The unnamed soft robot, which is about the size of a postage stamp, can move at a pace of 20 body lengths per second and withstand a million times its weight in tension.

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Weighing at between 20-65 milligrams (several prototypes have been developed), it can impressively withstand loads of about 60 kilograms without breaking, which is approximately one million times its own weight.

It simply gets up and goes about its business.

"Most of the robots at this particular small scale are very fragile. If you step on them, you pretty much destroy the robot. We found that if we put weight on our robot, it still more or less functions, " a report by sciencealert.com quoted mechanical engineer Liwei Lin, from the University of California, Berkeley, as saying.

Cockroaches are well-known for their toughness. Though the assumption that they would survive a nuclear holocaust is a little overblown, they do demonstrate a high level of radiation resistance under specific situations.

(With inputs from agencies)