Battle Extraction Assist Robot

What a face!

Meet BEAR, a life saving humanoid robot. It extracts wounded soldiers form potentially volatile areas.

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In 2007 Congress set aside $1.1 billion for the BEAR project. A life-saving humanoid robot, BEAR extracts wounded soldiers from potentially volatile areas. The robot's teddy bear face is intended to calm the wounded.

BEAR is able to go where humans cannot, or should not, go -- that includes everything from minefields to firefights, and near toxic chemical spills to inside structurally compromised buildings.

A combination of three things makes BEAR so special: its powerful hydraulic upper body, two independent sets of tracked "legs" that make it especially agile on rough terrain, and dynamic balancing behavior.

That dynamic balancing behavior, or DBB, means that BEAR can carry a heavy payload and stay balanced in three positions -- on its hips, in a very low-crouched configuration; on its knees, in a slightly higher configuration; and on its ankles, in an even higher, standing configuration.

BEAR was developed by Vecna Technologies at the Cambridge Research Laboratory near Boston. It is still in the proof-of-concept phase.