NASA Plans to Put an 'Iron Man' Robot on Mars

At 6'2", 275 pounds, NASA's latest robot look like a decent football player, but Valkyrie could be earmarked for another human profession — astronaut.

The android — which was built to be a search-and-rescue bot — comes with sonar equipment, cameras embedded from head to feet and a giant backpack battery. Its arms, legs and hips aren't as flexible as a person's, but it moves in a similar fashion, which could be important for studying the limits of human motion on Mars.

"Likely NASA will send robots ahead of the astronauts to the [red] planet," Nicolaus Radford, head of the Dexterous Robotics Lab at NASA, said in a video about Valkyrie. "These robots will start preparing the way for the human explorers. And when the humans arrive, the robots and the humans will work together in conjunction." Read more...