MIT Students Built a Terrifying Mix-and-Match Spider Robot to Build Lunar Colonies

America's top minds are apparently putting their all into developing space technology -- but we've gotta admit, we wouldn't really have had this in mind. As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed in a blog post, the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System (WORMS) modular lunar robot is intended to help NASA and other space agencies build and establish permanent Moon colonies by being able to do a bunch of different types of grunt work. "Robots could potentially do the heavy lifting [on a lunar colony] by laying cables, deploying solar panels, erecting communications towers, and building habitats," the press release reads. "But if each robot is designed for a specific action or task, a moon base could become overrun by a zoo of machines, each with its own unique parts and protocols." WORMS would head off that potential eventuality, MIT notes, by having mix-and-match components that can be traded in and off for whatever task is at hand -- and it's about as weird-looking as one could imagine a mix-and-match lunar robot could look, too.