This is Octavia. A disturbingly lifelike robot, she's stationed in the Navy's brand-new Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (or, yes, LASR) to teach human sailors how to work with robots and to learn, in turn, how to work with human sailors. Oh, and she fights fires – like the one a Navy scientist lights in a cavernous hangar bay.

While the fire starts burning inside a series of partitions, the scientist – playing the role of a fireman – silently gesticulates at Octavia. The robot's sensors and algorithms are meant to process the incomplete, contradictory or incorrect information that we humans spew every day. Octavia quickly processes and wheels herself through the entrance way. Once she's in front of the fire, she sprays her nozzle full of flame-retardant fluid at the blaze. Octavia uses a bit too much, though: Her infrared cameras triangulate a position to the fire, but she lacks heat sensors, so she tends to overdo it.

But that's par for the course in this gleaming, 2-week-old, 50,000-square-foot complex on the campus of the Naval Research Laboratory. Robots and their sensors come here to work out. Hard. That is, they perform tests to increase their autonomy from their human overlords in a range of realistic and varied environments, from simulated jungles to simulated deserts.

Inspired by the bird wrasse, this tiny robot diver has dorsal fins, not propellers. Photo: Mark Riffee/Wired

Those robots are going to be put to the test – in all sorts of ways. There's a 15-foot climbing wall. Directly below that, there's a sandbox three feet deep. Nearby, a big fan threatens to simulate a sandstorm – one that could gunk up the gears and blind the optics of the teal-painted robot arm in the middle of the sandbox.

That's what gives the LASR scientists pride. Robots that need to sift through Mideastern sand to find buried homemade bombs are going to get put through conditions as harsh and unforgiving to droids as the places the U.S. military will need them to operate.

It's not just sand. On the opposite end of the hall is the Tropical High Bay. It's a 60-foot greenhouse packed with dense jungle canopy, meant to simulate the wilds of Southeast Asia. And it's impressively realistic, down to the mango and jackfruit plants, the spider mites and the oppressively moist, 80 degree temperatures. The sprinkler systems on the roof can pump in six inches of rainfall per hour, "about as extreme as you're going to find on the planet," Schultz says. All that atmospheric punishment can be hell on sensors, radio frequency systems, ground robots and small drones that have to fly through dense foliage. Better, the Navy thinks, to run them through the simulations here before sailors and Marines have to deal with malfunctioning 'bots out in the field.

The LASR isn't just a workout space. It's a development studio. Beside a nearby indoor pool, the Navy shows off a hunk of metal that looks like a football with four dorsal fins. It's actually a prototype for an underwater drone modeled on a fish called the bird wrasse. Fish don't need propellers, the Navy scientists reason, so why should underwater drones?

Octavia's "brother," Lucas, sifts through contradictory information humans bark at him to process the truth. Photo: Mark Riffee/Wired

Perhaps the most impressive bio-inspired robot on display at the LASR is a thin, handheld plane with flashing red "eyes." It's a robotic bat. That is, it's a machine that uses sonar, not GPS, to guide itself, "the same way a bat would use to find its prey," says Navy scientist Dan Edwards. The idea is to develop an autonomous drone for urban environments too dense for GPS.

But Octavia, and her brother Lucas, might be the most advanced robots designed for human interaction. Both robots have sensors that let them hear human voices, understand speech, view infrared patterns and algorithmically compute how to handle discordant or contradictory information. Two different scientists, for instance, tell Lucas slightly different information about a hypothetical shipboard fire. His creepy, pale, babylike face tilts sideways in momentary confusion before correctly deducing where the fire actually is, as announced through his booming, human-like voice.

Octavia and Lucas may never get on ships themselves. Their lower halves are modified Segways, so there's no way they can climb the steep ladders up and down a ship's decks to douse shipboard flames. But the tests Octavia and Lucas go through here at this new lab will inform the functions of next-gen firefighter-bots, which should be able to get around a ship just fine. Not bad for a day's workout.