This video is a good overview of some of the cooler stuff that they're working on at the DFKI Robotics Innovation Center. I'm not that great with German, but "DFKI" may somehow stand for the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. They've partnered up with the Robotics Group at the University of Bremen to help turn basic robotics research into robots with "real-world applications," which also apparently includes a lot of space-type stuff.
One of the robots in the above video caught my eye in particular: ARAMIES, a sort of robot space explorer dog thing that looks like it came straight out of that lousy Red Planet movie:
ARAMIES was a DFKI project that began in 2004. It was sponsored by DLR (the German Space Agency), and was specifically designed to climb up steep and uneven terrain, like lunar craters or Martian canyons, using a mean looking set of claws:
Despite the additional complexity that comes with legs, the amount of mobility they offer is unprecedented, which is why robots like BigDog are so terrain-capable. While the ARAMIES project concluded in 2007, elements of the design and software live on in another crater-clambering robot called SpaceClimber, which is the spidery guy in the first video who looks cool enough to have earned itself an extra picture:
[ DFKI Bremen ]
