Be not afraid. Or maybe do. A spherical robot built at Duke University looks less like any machine on a factory floor and more like something lifted from the pages of Ezekiel. Twenty telescoping legs radiate from a central body. Cameras sit in each rounded foot. The device sees everywhere at once. It rolls, climbs and shifts direction without hesitation. Engineers named it Argus after the many-eyed giant of Greek myth. Online observers reached for a different reference. They called it a biblically accurate angel robot. The Design That Broke the Mold Boyuan Chen, a professor of engineering at Duke, set out to build something that refused familiar shapes. Most roboticists copy humans, dogs or insects. Chen’s team measured something else. They called it dynamic symmetry. The question was simple. How quickly can the machine accelerate in any direction? Arrangement of limbs mattered less than uniformity of motion.…