Greg Schroll is a crafty fellow, you can tell by his shirt, and his home made gyroscope powered spherical robot which can navigate some pretty rough terrain. Read on for more details and video.
Greg Schroll, a graduate student at Colorado State, has developed a spherical robot that uses gyroscopes instead of a movable mass for both drive power and steering. The gyros just have to sit there, and depending on which way they're being spun, they exert torque on the robot to move it forward or turn it. The big advantage to this is that the torque exerted by the gyros increases as they spin faster, meaning that more powerful motor does increase the power of the robot, giving it the ability to literally jump out of holes:
[Via]