"Cheetah-Cub" - A robot that runs like a cat
The latest robot with legs is designed to mimic a house cat. The smaller feline version of the robot was much more practical. The design of its legs faithfully mimic feline morphology, a four-legged "cheetah-cub robot" shares the advantages of its biological model: it is small, light and runs very fast.
It can run nearly seven times its body length in one second. Although not as agile as a real cat, it still has excellent auto-stabilisation characteristics when running at full speed, or over a course that included disturbances such as small steps. In addition, the robot is extremely robust and can be easily assembled from materials that are inexpensive and readily available.
It is developed at the Biorobotics Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique, Switzerland, and now it appears today in the International Journal of Robotics Research. In the long term, this type of machine could be used in search and rescue missions.
Video shows the robot kitty's legs spinning madly. According to Alexander Sproewitz, biomechanical roboticist and lead author of the new research, the headless robot, can run up to 1.4 meters per second.
"The very big potential for legged robots is application in rough terrain," Sproewitz says in the video, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The cheetah cub, or house-cat robot, would be much more likely to traverse a rocky mountain, for instance, than a wheeled robot.
Other robots from the institute's Biorobotics Laboratory are modeling on a salamander and a lamprey.
But there are other bio-inspired robots -- such as the RoboBee, perhaps the smallest flying robot, and a robotic cheetah that runs faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world.
