To locomote means to move from one place to another under your own power. Animals locomote in different ways: fish swim, birds fly, snakes slither, and kangaroos hop. When you walk to school, run across the playground, or even crawl under a table to retrieve a dropped pencil, you're locomoting.

Scientists and engineers study how creatures locomote to understand movement and design better robots. A biologist might observe how a cheetah locomotes at high speed, while a robotics engineer might build a machine that locomotes like an insect across rough terrain.

Though locomote sounds technical, it simply describes something we and other living things do constantly: moving ourselves around. A caterpillar locomotes by contracting its body segments in waves. A person locomotes by putting one foot in front of the other. The variety of ways different creatures locomote shows just how creative nature can be in solving the same basic problem: getting from here to there.