Narrator: This is Science Today. The Robotics Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, makes robots that help people. The robots they design are intended to assist soldiers with heavy loads, but that may not always be the case. Homayoon Kazerooni, a professor of mechanical engineering, has hopes their robotic device may one day help disabled people walk.

Kazerooni: Now it happened that we are using a healthy person in there, it happened that the application would be firefighters and soldiers, but the building blocks we developed at Berkeley will impact design of machines for people who are not walking optimally.

Narrator: Kazerooni emphasizes that the biological applications have not yet begun to be investigated in earnest and may not for several years, but the goal is a realistic one.

Kazerooni: We worked hard to make sure people would understand this is a serious and realistic application and it's far from science fiction and movies. We're simply augmenting people's capability.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.