Someday, robots rather than repairmen might climb towers and tall buildings to do hobs that are dangeroius for humans.

The idea is, as Science Daily put it, "like something straight out of 'Star Wars.'”

The details are coming in a professional paper written by Associate Professor Hod Lipson and several associates. Lipson crosses boundaries: He holds appointments in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Computer Science departments and is part of the faculty for graduate students in Computer Science and Computational Biology.

The building 'bot can "autonomously traverse and manipulate a 3-D truss structure, using specially designed gears and joints to assemble and disassemble the structure as it climbs," Science Daily reported.