Engineers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute in Germany built a small quadrupedal robot meant to leap around on the surface of the Moon, much like the Apollo astronauts did half a century ago.
Now SpaceBok, named after the bounding springbok antelope, is getting a Mars upgrade — on the Red Planet, it will have to weather much stronger gravity than on the Moon and face more treacherous terrain, as Wired reports.
The concept is a strong one. If it were to ever land on Mars, a walking robot could explore terrain that has so far been off limits to wheeled rovers — and maybe even the planet’s mysterious caves.
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