A robot with no clear front or back, and 20 eyes, is the latest proof of concept from engineers at Duke University.

The machine, called Argus, was built around a design principle the team calls dynamic symmetry. The researchers said it is agile enough to travel through forests and over wet surfaces and sand.

Argus can self-stabilise quickly after being pushed, reorient instantly in any direction, climb vertically between close walls, and carry and push payloads around a given space.

Roboticists at Duke said they worked on the principle that what really matters is not how a robot looks, but how uniformly it can act in any dimension in space.

Using that idea, the team simulated more than 1,500 robot configurations to develop a design approaching their theoretical maximum.

Duke said that in arriving at the design for Argus, with “a resemblance closer to a sea urchin than any commercial robot”, “the design proved robust.”

Jiaxun Liu, co-first author and PhD student in Duke’s General Robotics Lab, said: “Watching Argus move is unlike watching any other robot we’ve worked with.

“The first time we saw it navigate among trees and rough terrain, even under heavy collisions, we knew this was something different.”

Boyuan Chen, who leads the research and directs Duke’s General Robotics Lab, said: “We don’t just want robots that follow instructions.

“We want robots that help us learn things about the world we couldn’t learn any other way, and that sometimes means discovering the right body for the question first.”

The results of the research appear in the journal Science Robotics.

Read more from Talker News.