Washington: Researchers have developed a robot that can hurtle across uneven terrain like a water-walking lizard, can do gymnastic back flips and can climb tall objects.

Technologists at the University of Pennsylvania have created `RHex` and hope that it could one day climb rubble in emergency rescue situations or zoom across scorching desert sands with its six whirling, springy legs, CNN reported.

One of the researchers, Aaron Johnson , said that they want the robot to go anywhere, even over terrain that might be broken and uneven. RHex- short for " robot hexapod"- is actually more than a decade old and is the brainchild of a multi-university project, however, Penn researchers recently created a new version - called X- RHex Lite, which is lighter and more agile than previous versions. ANI