Tomorrow is Today

Italy’s Answer To American Robot Quadrupeds? A Robot Centaur: 

The researchers acknowledge that their robot still needs improvements before it can achieve the performance levels of Boston Dynamics’s famed quadrupeds, BigDog and AlphaDog, which can climb slopes, walk over icy surfaces, and even keep their balance after getting kicked. “We haven’t kicked our robot yet,” says Jonas Buchli, team leader of the HyQ project and a locomotion software expert. “But it’s starting to look eerily similar [to the way BigDog walks] … It looks almost like an animal.”

The IIT team is working with an Italian company to equip the robot with an on-board hydraulic system, which would eliminate the tether, an upgrade that should happen over the next several months. Another improvement is to add more sensors, including a Velodyne LIDAR, for mapping and navigation. (The researchers will describe HyQ’s systems in research papers but do not plan to make all hardware and software open source.)

And soon, HyQ will get a pair of manipulation arms, becoming, in effect, a kind of robotic Centaur [see CAD images below showing conceptual designs of the arms in stowed and extended configurations]. “We want to combine the advantages of both legs and arms,” Buchli says. ”Adding manipulation to a stable locomotion platform opens up some interesting possibilities.”

(via Italian Quadruped Robot Goes for a Walk - IEEE Spectrum)