I’ve just downloaded an inexplicably large video (120mb for 30 seconds? It’s called YouTube, guys) of this crab doing its thing. It’s certainly not as cool as the BigDog robot from yesterday, but it’s also not a multi-million-dollar DARPA-funded military all-terrain bioroid. It’s for scrambling around on sea floors and taking samples or pictures. Like the BigDog, they picked a successful multi-legged critter to base their design on, this time a crab.

It’s simple, energy efficient, and naturally fitted to its environment. Of course, it’s pretty small and at the moment its made of Legos, but just imagine these things crawling all over the sea floor at depth, looking for fissures, trash deposits, or (dare I dream?) treasure. It’s kind of creepy, actually.

Crab-like robot could benefit undersea exploration [via the Daily Mail]