Robots created by William “Red” Whittaker have crawled into mines and volcanoes, crossed deserts, won a 60-mile road race, helped clean up nuclear waste and harvested alfalfa. He has sheaves of academic awards and more than a dozen U.S. patents. “I have a very robot-centric view of the universe,” he said. Now the 63-year-old professor of robotics at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University is gambling on his boldest venture yet: designing and making a spacecraft capable of carrying one of his robots to the moon.
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