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Scientists Created the Optimal Robot, and You’ll Never Guess What It Looks Like

It’s not creepy at all.

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Roboticists have spent decades taking design cues from nature — building machines that walk like dogs, move like humans, and crawl like insects. A new robot from Duke University just made a case that they’ve been looking in the wrong place.

The robot is called Argus, named after the all-seeing monster of Greek mythology, and the reference is apt. It has 20 legs, no front or back, and looks more like a mechanical sea urchin than anything else. Each telescoping leg radiates outward from a central body with a depth camera at the tip, giving it a nearly 360-degree field of view. Duke researchers published their findings on May 27 in the journal Science Robotics.

The team ran more than 1,500 simulations........

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