The price tag is not a bug, it's a feature. What, you think DARPA would pay you millions of dollars to invent a real mule? Buck Rodgers movies didn't have mules!

I will say, though, that compared to the typical military-industrial spendthrift extravaganza, this project looks really worthwhile. Think: powered prosthetics for quadriplegics. Think: remote exploration of Martian mountains. Think: lots of generally applicable algorithms for real-time physics.