A very interesting (although complicated and time-consuming) way of fetching items.

an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. It might be a bit far-fetched but I thought it might be useful when exploring new planets. Combined with AI the robot would able to assess the terrain and deploy another robot the shape of which would be chosen to best suit its environment. I was thinking of this in the context of exploring places on other planets which are inaccessible by regular rovers (e.g. caves on Mars).