Another Stanford design that looks interesting are these flying drones with winches, that can attach small cables to objects, then clamp themselves to structures and haul away:

"Stanford researchers modify small flying robots to haul heavy loads"

https://youtu.be/GEJhb93rKlUO

Another interesting robot that was created a year or two after this article:

https://techfinder.stanford.edu/technology/new-soft-robot-sh...

Veritasium did a video segment on it:

https://youtu.be/058hRtaCWC0