Discuss “Biologically inspired robot can walk, run, climb walls, and more”

With six legs and a host of flashing lights, a robot claws its way up a carpeted wall.

This robot is RiSE, the second prototype in the Robots in Scansorial Environments project. RiSE is the product of collaboration between 20 researchers across seven different research groups. The schools involved include the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Berkeley, Lewis and Clark University, and our own Carnegie Mellon.

Engineers, computer scientists, and biologists from these schools are joined by industrial affiliates from Boston Dynamics, Inc. The resulting project is a five-year, $10 million DARPA-funded experiment in biodynotics, or the development of robots inspired by biology.

The biological inspirations for RiSE are some simple animals with...