Tree Climbing Robot

Tree-climbing robot

A remarkable, if slightly creepy, tree-climbing robot is being developed by robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and several other US Universities. And here's a video of it scrabbling up several different surfaces.

The aim of RiSE (Robots in Scansorial Environments) is to develop a robot capable of walking on land and also crawling up vertical surfaces. And it is funded by DARPA's Biodynotics Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robotics (BIODYNOTICS) Program.

Obviously such a robots could have plenty of useful applications, in search-and-rescue and space exploration, for example. But presumably it could also help you reach those really hard-to-prune branches