BigDog Goes To War

[Richard]

Boston Dynamics' walking bots take a load off soldiers' backs.

I guess soldiers need something to reduce their load with all the body armor being added nowadays. Kinda creepy looking, though.

And so it goes...

Richard

BigDog Goes To War
Forbes, 4 May 2011

Boston Dynamics has never been kind to BigDog. In YouTube videos that have racked up 18 million views, the robotics firm sets its four-legged, 235-pound, deer-size automaton climbing over rocks, slipping on ice and stumbling through mud. In some clips a technician kicks the bot to show that it can recover its footing. Marc Raibert, the company's president, says he gets letters telling him to stop abusing the robots. "Other companies build these things and are afraid to scratch them," he says. "We beat the crap out of ours, and they get tougher."

Boston Dynamics' machines, after all, are intended for war. The average American soldier carries as much as 145 pounds in the field, and the Pentagon wants to shift that load to machines. Boston Dynamics' latest quadruped, the LS3, aims to carry 400 pounds of materiel over 20 miles of rough terrain. It earned the contractor $33 million from Darpa, the Pentagon's out-there research arm. "Our goal is to develop robots with legs that have the mobility and agility of animals," says Raibert. An LS3 will cost more than $100,000.

Raibert spent a total of 15 years at Carnegie Mellon and at MIT, where he ran the groundbreaking "leg lab." The technology developed there allows for what he calls "dynamic stability." Most quadruped robots move slowly and keep three feet on the ground. But Boston Dynamics' bots, akin to walking or running humans, are constantly tipping, falling and regaining balance. The LS3 uses a gyroscopic sensor near the head and force and position sensors on each leg to maintain balance in motion.

Boston Dynamics will apply that same dynamic stability to Atlas, a headless humanoid that can walk on two legs, squeeze sideways through narrow spaces or crawl on its hands and feet. It's also working on Cheetah, a four-legged bot that the company says will run at 20mph when it appears in late 2012.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/05...-goes-war.html