LOCOMORPH — Locomotion and Morphology in Robotics — was a collaborative research project funded under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Running from 2009 to 2013, the project brought together leading universities and research labs across Europe to investigate how the physical shape and structure of a robot's body influences its ability to move through complex environments.
The central question behind LOCOMORPH was deceptively simple: can a robot's body do part of the "thinking" for it? In nature, animals don't rely solely on their nervous systems to control movement. The elasticity of tendons, the shape of limbs, and the compliance of muscle tissue all play active roles in generating stable, efficient locomotion. LOCOMORPH set out to apply these biological principles to robot design.
The project brought together a mix of research labs and student-driven organizations passionate about robotics and bio-inspired engineering:
Although the formal FP7 project concluded in 2013, the research threads it started continue to influence the field. Concepts like morphological computation, adaptive compliance, and body-environment coupling are now mainstream ideas in robotics. Many of the researchers involved in LOCOMORPH went on to lead labs and companies working on legged robots, soft robotics, and bio-inspired AI.
LOCOMORPH.eu carries that legacy forward as an independent platform — covering the ongoing advances in robotics, locomotion, and intelligent machines that the original project helped set in motion.