The Chembot revolution rolls, or rather oozes, on! The heretofore rather mundane iRobot Corporation reveals its hand somewhat by debuting a bizarre new entrant into its arsenal.

This device claims to take advantage of a form of locomotion the company refers to as "Jamming", we hesitate to suggest how badly that designation disturbs our already sensitive "Evil Robot Potential Misbehavior Scale". Plus, it's just kind of gross.

And, of course, you have DARPA to thank for this one as well. Going for the brass ring, they are...

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"We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.

Errmm, yeah, that's not good. Soon all of you honest parents will be able to answer your children when they ask if there are monsters under the bed; "Uhhmmm, well...maybe, yeah..."


Full Story at CNET