Ghost Robotics, Minitaur in snow With nimble legs, the Minitaur robot climbs a snowy hill.

Minitaur wants to get a leg up on wheeled robots.

It was sand that killed Spirit. In May 2009, after years spent traversing the Martian surface, NASA’s Spirit rover got stuck in a sand trap. And, for the last two years of its mission life, it remained stuck, wheels powerless against the loose, light sand. All vehicles sent to Mars so far are wheeled. But what if there was another way to explore a distant world?“With a wheeled robot, you can try and go forward, or you can try and go backward, and that’s about all the affordance you have trying to get out of a bind like that,” says Gavin Kenneally, one of the cofounders of Ghost Robotics. We are talking today about the Ghost Robotics Minitaur, a legged robot that first made waves last year with its ability to climb fences and jump to open doors. Check out oldbet9jamobile“With a legged machine,” Gavin continues, “there’s a lot of difficulty coordinating all the degrees of freedom. That’s why we haven’t seen as many legged robots in the market until now. Once you have the coordination problem down, you have so many ways of getting yourself out of these, you’re not going to get stuck trying to go backward and trying to go forward. You really have lots of options.”Mars is my own hypothetical here. There are no talks to send the robot anywhere besides Earth, and extraterrestrial exploration is another set of hurdles well beyond where the design is now. Still, it’s hard to watch it scramble over rocks and not think about movement in alien worlds.For their part, Ghost Robotics’ ambitions are focused very much on concerns at earth.