Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey

Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough. That’ll change soon. BigDog’s makers are working on a new quadruped that moves faster than any human and is agile enough to “chase and evade.”
Boston Dynamics, maker of the Army’s BigDog robotic mule, announced today that Darpa has awarded it a contract to build a much faster and more fearsome animal-like robot, Cheetah.
As the name implies, Cheetah is designed to be a four-legged robot with a flexible spine and articulated head (and potentially a tail) that runs faster than the fastest human. In addition to raw speed, Cheetah’s makers promise that it will have the agility to make tight turns so that it can “zigzag to chase and evade” and be able to stop on a dime.

Cheetah builds off work on the company’s previous four legged animal bot, BigDog.  It was built as a kind of unmanned pack mule, designed to carry equipment for troops on the battlefield. The robotic donkey could carry 300 lbs. over 13 miles on flat ground, take a swift kick and keep on moving. It’s creepy, lifelike movement can be seen on a number of videos online, climbing over hills and snow and hiking alongside soldiers, using GPS coordinates as its waypoints.
Aside from its unspecified military applications, Cheetah’s makers see it galloping to the rescue and building a brave new future in the fields of “emergency response, firefighting, advanced agriculture and vehicular travel.”
Think that’s creepy? Wait till you see its humanoid, Terminator look-alike buddy.
Meet Atlas, Cheetah’s humanoid pal. Atlas is supposed to look more or less like the T-800 series of Terminators, minus the head. Its designers say it’ll be able to walk like a human over rough terrain, crawling on its hands and knees when necessary and turning itself sideways to slip through any narrow passages it encounters. Headless, with a torso and two arms, it’s a step up from Boston Dynamics’ other biped, the lower-body-bot Petman.
Petman was built to test out chemical weapons protective suits for the Army by “walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics” and “simulat[ing] human physiology.” Designers made it capable of walking heel-to-toe at 3.2 miles per hour and staying upright even after it gets pushed.
As the new models go into development, let’s hope Cheetah never develops a taste for human flesh and that Atlas doesn’t have any hard feelings about its predecessor being a poison-gas guinea pig for the Army.
Images: Boston Dynamics

Robofish

 

Small swimming robots could aid underwater sensing and exploration.

Borrowing from Mother Nature, MIT researchers have built a school of swimming robofish that slip through the water just as gracefully as the real thing, if not quite as fast. Mechanical-engineering colleagues Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado '99, SM '01, PhD '07 (above), and professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi, SM '81, ScD '85, designed the sleek and inexpensive robots to maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can't go. Fleets of them could be used to inspect submerged structures such as boats and oil and gas pipes; to patrol ports, lakes, and rivers; and to help detect environmental pollutants.
"Given the [robotic] fish's robustness, it would be ideal as a long-term sensing and exploration unit," says Valdivia y Alvarado. "Several of these could be deployed, and even if only a small percentage make it back, there wouldn't be a terrible capital loss."
Robotic fish are not new: in 1994, MIT ocean engineers demonstrated the four-foot-long Robotuna. Robotuna had 2,843 parts controlled by six motors, but the new robotic fish, which is less than a foot long, is powered by a single motor and is made of fewer than 10 individual components, protected by a flexible body. The motor, placed in the fish's midsection, initiates a wave that travels along the fish's body, propelling it forward. So far, the MIT prototype fish can swim as fast as one body length per second. That's much slower than real fish, which can cover up to 10 times their body length in a second.
As part of his doctoral thesis, Valdivia y Alvarado created a model that calculates how stiff each part of the robot's body should be to generate the desired speed and swimming motion. With this model, the researchers can use polymers to create a continuous fish body that is stiffer in some places and more flexible in others, instead of building each body section separately and then joining them together. "This philosophy can be used for more than just fish," says Youcef-Toumi. For example, it could help improve robotic prosthetic limbs.
This fall, the researchers plan to investigate more complex locomotion and test some new prototype robotic salamanders and manta rays, says Valdivia y Alvarado. This research should put their approach to a harder test.