A team of Italian boffins has come up with a cunning plan to send robots to the moon.

Team Italia is hoping to win the Google Lunar X Prize by sending robots which look like spiders onto the lunar surface. All the major Italian aerospace and engineering universities, as well as the two largest Italian aerospace companies are behind the scheme.

Boffin Alberto Rovetta, a professor of robot mechanics at Politecnico di Milano has designed lunar robots resemble skittering spiders or crabs that could deploy as a swarm of mobile cameras and sensors on both legs and wheels.

To win the price they have to get a robot on the moon, move at least 500 meters and beam high definition views back to Earth. The project is seen as an attempt by Italy to take a leading role in space exploration.