This is absolutely amazing. https://youtube/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ As the story in Crikey said: The terrain is rough, autumn in New England, orange leaves thick on a steep hill. The creature struggles with a heavy pack, all four legs straining away, making its way upward, threading through the trees. At the plateau, someone gives it a swift kick in the side and it tumbles sideways, staggering, pivoting, compensating for the blow, one leg crossing back across the other, balletic, elegant. Balanced again, the creature would, to assess its surroundings, hold its head up -- if it had a head. Instead there’s just a space where that should be, because the creature is a BigDog robot, symmetrical in either direction, designed to mimic the motion, balance and fluidity of an animal with the relentlessness of a machine. The BigDog can move across just about any terrain, and it’s part of a family -- the Cheetah, the LittleDog -- designed in the spirit of robotics’ big idea of the millennium: that robots should neither be ever-more precise versions of blocky, mute machines, i.e. supercars, nor necessarily mimic the human shape, which has fairly specific applications and limits, but should instead use all the mechanics of nature, both imitated and recombined, to get past any number of technical impasses. The result, with something like the BigDog, is bizarre to behold, both beautiful and eerie, at once like an animal, vivomorphic, but also very different. (the company is now owned by Google, of course)
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 19:17:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015