If you were making a multi-limbed symmetric nightmare of a robot, where else would you look for a name but Greek Mythology? The team at Duke University that came up with this particular multi-limbed creature had two obvious choices: name it for one of the Hundred-Handed giants, the Hecatoncheires, or lean on the fact that each limb has its own sensor and go for many-eyed Argus. Argus sounds better to a funding committee, so Argus it is.

Hecatoncheries would be a bit of a reach anyway, considering Argus only has 20 limbs in its current incarnation. It uses what the researchers are calling its ‘dynamic symmetry’ to get around– extending and retracting its many limbs to exert forces in any direction, it can bounce about like a beach ball on a windy day.

At least in the embedded demo video, it seems to work surprisingly well. If you want to try it for yourself but don’t have a robot-building research grant, you’re in luck. The team at Duke has an open-source simulator available on GitHub so you can explore the concept, including trying variants with more and fewer legs than the 20-limbed unit featured here. Given that it works with only a dozen effectors, you can imagine the Argus we see has a certain degree of redundancy, something funder DARPA is doubtless keen on.

It is an oddball idea, and something we might imagine seeing in Star Wars, but it’s obviously got its pluses. We can’t really imagine any of the humanoid robots we’ve seen doing parkour like this thing. Somehow it’s less creepy than the robot dogs that are becoming common — along with being security risks.