DARPA's latest humanoid robot jumps and climbs with athletic precision
DARPA's latest humanoid robot jumps and climbs with athletic precision
iThinkShare
The firm behind some of the most impressive robots we’ve seen
this year is back at it again with an anthropomorphic, bipedal robot
that can climb and jump its way out of tough situations. PET-PROTO is a
relative of last year’s PETMAN, and its builder, Boston Dynamics, hope to use the advances it’s squeezed into the new robot in competition at DARPA’s Robotics Challenge
in June. The Challenge is designed to robots' ability to perform
complex tasks in "dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments."
In its newest video (below), posted by Wired, DARPA shows the PET-PROTO facing off against the kinds of obstacles it might encounter at the Challenge, using its Gekko-like
legs to scale a knee-high ledge and leaping to the floor with a
femur-splintering thud before traversing a wall-to-wall hole in a
hallway floor. The video demonstrates the robot’s ability to perform
autonomous decision-making, says the Agency.
PET-PROTO is one step closer to Boston Dynamics’s Atlas robotic
platform, which DARPA will make available at its Challenge to teams that
wouldn’t otherwise have the necessary hardware expertise or capital to
take part. For a look at what other teams are planning to compete with, this post from IEEE Spectrum offers a thorough breakdown, including Virginia Tech’s THOR (Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot), pictured below.
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