A bouncing robot based on the African primate the bush baby has been could soon be springing around the rubble of disaster zones, hunting for trapped victims.

The little machine can spring off walls and leap higher into the air than any robot built so far.

To build the robot, known as Salto (for saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles), engineers at the University of California studied the animal kingdom's most vertically agile creature, the bush baby, which can jump five times in just four seconds to gain a combined height of 8.5 meters (27.9 feet).

The bush baby has a special ability to store energy in its tendons so that it can jump to heights not achievable by its muscles alone. Salto can jump 1.75 meters per seconds.

"Developing a metric to easily measure vertical agility was key to Salto's design because it allowed us to rank animals by their jumping agility and then identify a species for inspiration," said Duncan Haldane, a robotics Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, who led the work.