Robots have been designed to do just about everything from serving food to bomb defusing, but they don’t typically have the free-range movement that humans do when it comes to navigating uneven terrain. Take climbing a mountainside, wide degrees of motion and agility allow humans (and animals) the ability to handle and obstacle. Bots can only watch.
However, robotics engineers from the University of Texas and Meka Robotics (located in San Francisco) are looking to overcome this obstacle with the introduction of the Hume bi-pedal robot. The team, headed by Louis Sentis from the Human Centered Robotics Lab at UT, has designed the Hume robot to incorporate a HCHA (Human-Centered Hyper Agility) range of movement. To do this, the team used a series of elastic actuators (6 DOF SEA total)for each joint which provides the robot with 6 degrees of spatial movement (including lateral).These powerful modular actuators give the robot its strength, speed, and a certain degree of agility. The Hume design is still in its infancy stage, as there is no internal power source and has yet to acquire feet, but it looks to be a step in the right direction for all-terrain bi-pedal robots. On the other hand, I don’t think robots will replace humans in the sport of Parkour anytime soon.
Also see PetMan from Boston Dynamics. (Hume designers should take note.)
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