Creepy and amazing

That's what BigDog is. It's a gasoline powered quadruped robot funded by DARPA and developed by Boston Dynamics. These robots "have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go." Check out the video here.

What creeps me out is the noise the thing makes and the look of it. It's got an eerie resemblance to a spider (it's the legs), and for a while, I thought it was two humans, participating in some kind of performance art. Armor that sucker up, put a weapon on it, and I wouldn't want to see it marching up my hill.

What amazes me is its lifelike mobility. When it slips, you feel sorry for it because it moves so much like an animal--you've slipped like that before. You can practically feel it. The control it has in recovering is mind-boggling, as is the way it can mimic different types of gait. Besides watching it move on ice, the thing that I can't stop watching is the lab test where it leaps over the obstacle and gets all four "feet" past the mark. The computational power and engineering behind this is staggering.

All references to The Terminator, the works of Isaac Asimov, or the walkers in The Empire Strikes Back are appropriate.