Developing walking and climbing robots have always been the ultimate challenge for robot locomotion. A couple of DARPA-funded programs have come up with some very interesting results.

One of them, dubbed BigDog, is being developed by BostonDynamic and is touted as the mosts advanced Quadruped robot on earth. (See www.bdi.com/content/sec... ). Check out this video of this robot in action.

Another robot, RiSE, that is being developed at CMU, is a bioinspired climbing robot that can walk on land, as well as climb trees and other vertical surfaces as seen in this video.