Cave exploration is a lousy place for any sort of robot due to the ever changing terrain. Most caves worth exploring have vertical entrances, one has to rappel

Cave exploration is a lousy place for any sort of robot due to the ever changing terrain. Most caves worth exploring have vertical entrances, one has to rappel into, let's see a robot do that and then climb a 15 foot nuisance drop, then open a heavy culvert door with a blast of wind either coming at you or sucking in pulling on the door, then climb down a ladder in that culvert, traverse some more passage, then rappel off Boulder falls, and on to the Rift, with has a safety line one has to clip onto so when your go around the Freakout Traverse you don't die if you fall, and so on... Yes, this is Lech. The floor is almost never flat, the ceiling height changes from 100's of feet to mere inches, the passage widths vary immensely, there are pools of water, streams, loose rock, sand, boulders, some the size of houses in Lechuguilla and other large caves, narrow channels in the floor, it's a mess. No robot currently in production could traverse even the most featureless of beginners caves. It will be decades before robots are ready to explore caves.