Meet Argus, the robot with 20 eyes and no bad side

Duke engineers stopped asking what a robot should look like and started asking what shape can move most evenly in any direction. The answer is weirder than you’d think.

Most robots copy something from nature—you know,dogs,birds,humans. A team of engineers at Duke University determined that was boring and decided to build a hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology instead.We’ll back up for a minute. The question the researchers actually started with was: what shape can move equally well in every direction? They ran more than 1,500 simulations, ranking each design using a new metric called dynamic isotropy, with a score from 0 to 1 measuring how evenly a robot can accelerate itself in any direction. Most robots, including humanoids and drones, score below 0.6, but their winning design scored 0.91.The result isArgus: a robot with 20 modular, telescoping legs radiating from a central frame built around a regular dodecahedron. Each leg has a depth camera on the end (the “eyes,” as it were), hence its mythological name. Argus has no designated front, back, top or bottom. Instead, it moves by extending and retracting different subsets of legs to generate force in any direction, rolling and bracing rather than stepping.Unlike the rather intimidating Greek giant it’s named after, robot Argus is weirdly adorable in action. In testing, it rolled through forests, crossed uneven terrain, climbed between parallel walls by repeatedly bracing and thrusting itself upward, pushed a three-foot cube while continuously tumbling and shrugged off heavy collisions. Not bad, little dude.Some say Argus looks like a jellyfish, but that’s kind of a stretch. Think bigger, people! We think it looks way more like theHecatoncheires(although that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily). Hmm. Perhaps aLovecraftian cosmic entity? Abiblically accurate angel? Maybe just a particularly ambitious tumbleweed?In theirnew paperpublished in Science Robotics, the Duke researchers note that dynamic symmetry could become a general framework for evaluating robot bodies, not just Argus. They also released anopen-source simulatorso other groups can run their own 1,500-morphology sweeps—which means, you, too, can use math to build your own adorable faceless cryptid and name it after the mythological character of your choosing! Or just call it Mr. Tumbleweed Blob. That works, too.

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