Scientists develop robot with 20 legs that can climb walls

By Dean Murray

A "sea urchin" robot with 20 legs that can climb up walls has been unveiled.

Engineers at Duke University have shown off Argus, a bot with no front, no back, and 20 eyes.

They say the proof of concept is for a new design principle called dynamic symmetry, and is agile enough to travel through forests or over wet surfaces and sand.

Argus can self-stabilize quickly after being pushed; reorient instantly in any direction; climb vertically between close walls; and even carry and push payloads around a given space.

Roboticists at Duke University say they worked on the principle that what really matters is not how a robot looks, but how uniformly it can act in any dimension in space.

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Guided by this concept, the team simulated more than 1,500 robot configurations to develop a design approaching their theoretical maximum.

Arriving at the design for Argus, Duke said that, with "a resemblance closer to a sea urchin than any commercial robot, the design proved robust."

Jiaxun Liu, co-first author and PhD student in Duke’s General Robotics Lab, said: "Watching Argus move is unlike watching any other robot we’ve worked with.

"The first time we saw it navigate among trees and rough terrain, even under heavy collisions, we knew this was something different."

Boyuan Chen, who leads this research and directs Duke’s General Robotics Lab, said: "We don’t just want robots that follow instructions.

"We want robots that help us learn things about the world we couldn’t learn any other way, and that sometimes means discovering the right body for the question first."

The results of the research appear in the journal Science Robotics.