China tests a Dune-like iron-harvesting crawler robot in the Taklamakan Desert

Chinese researchers have built a self-propelled crawler robot that harvests iron from sand and tested the device in the dunes of the vast Taklamakan Desert – an area the size of Germany – in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

In Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel Dune, mobile factories traverse the sands of the fictional planet Arrakis to extract the drug melange, also known as “spice”.

The real-world device similarly travels across the desert, extracting valuable...