Science fiction has led many people to be interested in humanoid robots, and the participants in the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals are no exception. But the new “Hermes” robot built by MIT goes above and beyond what other engineers have done.

According to Gizmodo, its movements are incredibly smooth, because instead of trying to simulate human movement through an algorithm, this robot is actually connected to a human controller. The MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering has constructed a robot that can mimic the exact movements of its human controller. But, in order to operate the more delicate functions such as gripping with hands and fingers, the human has the option of using a joystick instead.

Although this machine mimics human movement, it is much stronger than the human controlling it, which makes it the ideal candidate to perform missions in dangerous locations, such as search and rescue missions. While it braves the dangerous elements, its human controller will be completely safe from harm.
According to the developers, “The human’s still going to provide that creativity, that problem-solving and that large-scale coordination of all the joints, but we’ve designed the robot to be stronger than a person, so we’d imagine that in the future we want to merge some level of autonomous control along with the human’s intelligence.”