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Find out about UNO's summer robotics workshops for junior high and high school students.

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As NASA prepares for the Sunday landing of its most sophisticated Mars rover yet, University of Nebraska researchers are working on the next generation of robots that could go even deeper into space.

Someday some distant asteroid or faraway moon could be explored by self-reconfiguring robots - think Transformers - such as those being developed by a University of Nebraska at Omaha computer science professor, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln engineering professor and their two teams of researchers.

"What we're doing is changing the paradigm to adapt to environments we don't know as much about," said Carl Nelson, the UNL engineering professor. "We're not designing to replace the robots NASA's already building.