The word quadruped means, technically, “four feet.” Roboticists tend to apply the term to anything that uses four limbs to walk, differentiating it from bipedal robots, which walk on two limbs instead. But there’s a huge, blurry crossover there, in both robotics and biology, where you find animals (and occasionally robots) that can transition from […]
The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) is well known in bipedal robotics circles for teaching very complex humanoid robots to walk. Since 2015, IHMC has been home to a Boston Dynamics Atlas (the DRC version) as well as a NASA Valkyrie, and significant progress has been made on advancing these platforms toward […]
For a robot that shares a leg design with the fastest-running bird on the planet, we haven’t ever really gotten a sense of how fast Agility Robotics’ Cassie is actually able to move. Oregon State University’s Cassie successfully ran a 5k last year, but it was the sort of gait that we’ve come to expect […]
When we think of bipedal humanoid robots, we tend to think of robots that aren’t just human-shaped, but also human-sized. There are exceptions, of course—among them, a subcategory of smaller humanoids that includes research and hobby humanoids that aren’t really intended to do anything practical. But at the In International Conference on Robotics and Automation […]
Back in February of 2019, we wrote about a sort of humanoid robot thing (?) under development at Caltech, called Leonardo. LEO combines lightweight bipedal legs with torso-mounted thrusters powerful enough to lift the entire robot off the ground, which can handily take care of on-ground dynamic balancing while also enabling some slick aerial maneuvers. […]
For a long time, having a bipedal robot that could walk on a flat surface without falling over (and that could also maybe occasionally climb stairs or something) was a really big deal. But we’re more or less past that now. Thanks to the talented folks at companies like Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics, we now […]