A NASA team is putting the finishing tweaks on its amazing, and somewhat creepy, climbing robot RoboSimian, a four-limbed automaton built to compete in a U.S. military robotics challenge in 2015.
RoboSimian will compete with other robots in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest that tests robots in disaster response scenarios to see how they weather situations that could be ultra-dangerous for humans. The contest will occur in June.
It was a close choice between RoboSimian, which NASA engineers have described as an "ape-like" robot, and a more human-like robotic companion constructed this year, called Surrogate, but team members decided to go with the robot that had already been tested for trials in the challenge. [DARPA's Robotics Challenge in Photos]