This summer, a group of scientists will travel to Oregon’s snow-capped Mt. Hood to train a dog-shaped robot named Spirit how to walk. The slopes of Mt. Hood are strewn with volcanic rocks and sprinkled with glaciers, a rugged environment that researchers think resembles the moon — which Spirit is being prepared to eventually explore.
“What we realized, pretty early on, is that a legged robot has the ability to interact with soil in ways that wheels cannot,” Douglas Jerolmack, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and the principal investigator of the project, said in a statement. “This interaction isn’t just about mobility; it’s about questioning and understanding the environment it moves through, in real time.”
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