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Millions of years of evolution have allowed animals to develop unusual locomotion capabilities. A striking example is the legless-jumping of click beetles and trap-jaw ants, which jump more than 10 times their body length. Their delicate musculoskeletal system amplifies their muscles’ power. It is challenging to engineer insect-scale jumpers that use onboard actuators for both elastic energy storage and power amplification. Typical jumpers require a combination of at least two actuator mechanisms for elastic energy storage and jump triggering, leading to complex designs having many parts. Here, we report the new concept of dynamic buckling cascading, in which a single unidirectional actuation stroke drives an elastic beam through a sequence of energy-storing buckling modes automatically followed by spontaneous impulsive snapping at a critical triggering threshold. Integrating this cascade in a robot enables jumping with unidirectional muscles and power amplification (JUMPA). These JUMPA systems use a single lightweight mechanism for energy storage and release with a mass of 1.6 g and 2 cm length and jump up to 0.9 m, 40 times their body length. They jump repeatedly by reengaging the latch and using coiled artificial muscles to restore elastic energy. The robots reach their performance limits guided by theoretical analysis of snap-through and momentum exchange during ground collision. These jumpers reach the energy densities typical of the best macroscale jumping robots, while also matching the rapid escape times of jumping insects, thus demonstrating the path toward future applications including proximity sensing, inspection, and search and rescue. 

Abstract Scattering of high energy particles from nucleons probes their structure, as was done in the experiments that established the non-zero size of the proton using electron beams 1 . The use of charged leptons as scattering probes enables measuring the distribution of electric charges, which is encoded in the vector form factors of the nucleon 2 . Scattering weakly interacting neutrinos gives the opportunity to measure both vector and axial vector form factors of the nucleon, providing an additional, complementary probe of their structure. The nucleon transition axial form factor, F A , can be measured from neutrino scattering from free nucleons, ν μ n  →  μ − p and $${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }p\to {\mu }^{+}n$$ ν ¯ μ p → μ + n , as a function of the negative four-momentum transfer squared ( Q 2 ). Up to now, F A ( Q 2 ) has been extracted from the bound nucleons in neutrino–deuterium scattering 3–9 , which requires uncertain nuclear corrections 10 . Here we report the first high-statistics measurement, to our knowledge, of the $${\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }\,p\to {\mu }^{+}n$$ ν ¯ μ p → μ + n cross-section from the hydrogen atom, using the plastic scintillator target of the MINERvA 11 experiment, extracting F A from free proton targets and measuring the nucleon axial charge radius, r A , to be 0.73 ± 0.17 fm. The antineutrino–hydrogen scattering presented here can access the axial form factor without the need for nuclear theory corrections, and enables direct comparisons with the increasingly precise lattice quantum chromodynamics computations 12–15 . Finally, the tools developed for this analysis and the result presented are substantial advancements in our capabilities to understand the nucleon structure in the weak sector, and also help the current and future neutrino oscillation experiments 16–20 to better constrain neutrino interaction models.