It’s always fun when a new Boston Dynamics/DARPA robot comes out—and while we’re a bit late to the party on this one (the vid was out 8 days ago and has already got over a million hits), it’s still worth mentioning.

I mean, look at it, it’s ridiculous—a behemoth of a machine that looks almost like a parody of a futuristic robot death-beast from Starship Troopers. But other than just making us all squirm and giving drones a good name, the aim of this current four-legged automaton, the DARPA Legged Squad Support System (LS3), is to “demonstrate that a highly mobile, semi-autonomous legged robot can carry 400 lbs of a squad’s load, follow squad members through rugged terrain and interact with troops in a natural way, similar to a trained animal and its handler.”

It may look totally unnecessary walking across the woodlands of earth, but just wait until we send this one onto hostile planets with a squad of space marines.

@stewart23rd