Hasta La Gadget!

Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot impressed people all over the world when it proved that it can outrun even the fastest of our species. But some of you may have been thinking, what’s to be afraid of? It’s tied down. Unless we’re on the same treadmill Cheetah isn’t touching anybody. Well, it’s not tied down anymore.

Meet WildCat, the latest generation of the Cheetah. While its tethered predecessor has a recorded top speed of over 29mph, WildCat can “only” get up to 16mph. Not enough to outrun Usain Bolt, but enough to catch up to the average human, running at a full out sprint.

Between drones and Boston Dynamics’ DARPA-funded cats and dogs, we should start looking into this Rapture thing.

[via Boston Dynamics via Gizmodo]

It doesn’t matter how extreme your stunt was no one’s going to want to see your home video when it’s bouncing all over the place making people sick to their stomach. But now you can skip the stabilization software and stop the shaky cam problem at its source with these handheld gimbals.

Read more…

When it comes to hunting down humans running speeds, MIT’s cheetah might come second to Boston Dynamics’ own high-velocity quadruped, but by substituting pneumatics with motors, MIT’s version apparently runs far more efficiently. At the recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the Institute of Technology showed of its newest version, which reached a top speed of 13.7 mph. To accomplish this, the runner still needs parallel support bars to constrain movement in one dimension, reducing any roll, yaw — and the chances of a pretty expensive fall. The team says the new version’s cost of transport (COT is power consumption divided by weight, times velocity) is around 0.52. In comparison, Honda’s Asimo has a hefty COT of 2.

This impressive efficiency is down to the use of electric motors over hydraulics, with a new “three phase permanent magnet synchronous motor” providing the necessary torque. Researchers also used biometric principles to conserve energy and reduce stress on joints, including Kevlar tendons across the back of the legs. With all those efficiency increases, it mean that MIT’s cheetah can theoretically run while carrying its own power source. We’ve added a video after the break, where you can see the bot hit its top speed while carrying some battery dummy weights.

Filed under: Robots

Comments

Via: Spectrum IEEE

Source: MIT Biomimetics

While Boston Dynamics‘ Cheetah has already premiered, speeding along on its robot-friendly treadmill, we’ve now got a better glimpse at how the similarly DARPA-funded human-hunting obstacle-scaling Atlas fares, courtesy of its ancestor. That’s the Pet-Proto you can see in the video below, balancing and leaping across narrow terrain, conducting its own “autonomous decision-making” and keeping upright — all very important points for DARPA’s own Robotics Challenge, a competition where winners will gain access to their very own modified version of the Atlas for future disaster response tests. Watch the Pet-Proto gradually advance towards camera right after the break. And we’ll sleep with one eye open.

Continue reading DARPA’s Pet-Proto robot climbs, balances, jumps, comes to get you

Filed under: Robots, Alt

DARPA’s Pet-Proto robot climbs, balances, jumps, comes to get you originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  DARPA TV (YouTube), DARPA Robotics Challenge  | Email this | Comments

Remember the Cheetah robot, developed by Boston Dynamics for DARPA? It wasn’t long ago that the robot hit a top speed of 18mph, which seemed insanely fast for a hunk of metal with four legs. Now the quadruped ‘bot has smashed its own record, running faster than the world’s fastest man.

DARPA just posted video footage of Cheetah running at a top speed of 28.3mph for a 20-meter split, which is actually faster than Usain Bolt’s record time of 27.78mph. Granted, Cheetah was running on a treadmill, but I still wouldn’t ever want this thing chasing me down the street. There’s no way you or I could escape its hurtling mass. Check out Cheetah as it breaks its own land-speed record in the video clip below:

Just don’t ever give Cheetah any sort of stabby weapons, or else we’ll all be done for.

[via DARPA]