Our latest paper in Advanced Intelligent Systems describes ELEANOR, a new large-scale soft robotic arm inspired by the African elephant trunk.
The elephant trunk is a remarkable biological manipulator. It has no bones and no joints, yet it can lift heavy objects, delicately pick up small items, bend in many directions, and reshape itself continuously.
Our previous work on living elephants showed that this extraordinary flexibility does not rely on an unlimited repertoire of movements. Instead, elephants combine a relatively small number of strategies, including bending, elongation, and the temporary formation of pseudo-joints.
With ELEANOR, we asked whether some of these principles could be built directly into a robot.
Rather than assembling the arm from a series of rigid or modular joints, ELEANOR has a continuous, tapered, and fully compliant body. The 85-cm-long structure is produced by large-scale 3D printing and actuated by tendons arranged to mimic key muscle orientations found in the natural trunk.
The result is a robot that can undergo large, smooth deformations and use its whole body to interact with the environment. ELEANOR can bend, wrap around objects, and adapt its shape to items of different sizes and stiffnesses.
The broader lesson is an important one for bio-inspired robotics: complex behaviour does not always require complex control.
By understanding how biological form and mechanics contribute to movement, we can design robots in which part of the “intelligence” is already embedded in the body itself.
This work was led by Lucia Beccai’s Soft BioRobotics Perception Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. We are happy to have contributed to this research, together with collaborators from Korea Aerospace University, Photocentric, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, within the EU Horizon 2020 PROBOSCIS project.
Read the paper
Continuous and Large-Scale: ELEANOR, the Soft Architected Arm Inspired by the Elephant Trunk
Naselli, Nardin, Joe, Drinkwater, Donato, Bianchi, Falotico, Milinkovitch & Beccai
Advanced Intelligent Systems (2026), e70532
DOI: 10.1002/aisy.70532
Our other publications on elephants
Locally-curved geometry generates bending cracks in the African elephant skin
Martins, Bennett, Clavel, Groenewald, Hensman, Hoby, Joris, Manger & Milinkovitch
Nature Communications 9, 3865 (2018)
Elephants evolved strategies reducing the biomechanical complexity of their trunk
Dagenais, Hensman, Haechler & Milinkovitch
Current biology 31 : 4727–4737 (2021)
Stereotypical force patterns of the elephant trunk in planar reaching movements
Agabiti, Donato, Setti, Dagenais, Milinkovitch, Laschi, Sabatini, Mazzolai & Falotico
iScience 29, 4 (2026)