Blue Collar Scientist

This neat little robot has DARPA written all over it. Take special note of how it channels Bambi while on ice a bit more than a minute into the video; all that is really needs are some slide whistle cartoon sound effects.

I’m glad I’m seeing this thing first in video. If I’d met it out in the woods I’m pretty sure I would have had a terminal surreal moment and never been quite the same again.

The noise that thing makes reminds me of the stepper motors that drive some telescopes. That noise can be cut drastically, either by switching to servos, by driving the steppers differently, or by getting different steppers and not microstepping them¹.

I’m very impressed with the balance control capabilities of this robot; I’d always assumed that sort of thing would be wicked hard to program. I’m sure it is no mean feat mechanically to get limbs, which have some mass I’m sure, to react that quickly when it gets shoved. What I’m wondering about is the power supply. How much range does this thing have - and how long can it go between refueling or recharging? How efficient is quadrupedy, compared to four-wheel drive, or track drive? And how much better is it at dealing with obstacles and difficult terrain? This is the kind of engineering project that not only raises questions like can you build it, but should you.

Your blogger is too lazy today to actually go do the research necessary to answer these questions. Enjoy the video.

1. Assuming, of course, that it really is stepper noise - I’m making an educated guess that could easily be wrong. [↩]

Tags: Big Dog, Boston Dynamics, cargo, DARPA, dog, robot

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under computer science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.