Nowadays robots are thus far a lot advanced that they used to be, even just a decade ago. But for all the wonderful stuffs these machines can do now, still they are scuffling with single thing, i.e. two-legged walking.
Ameca is a humanoid robot that duplicates realistic facial expressions that only humans can do.
However, it’s possible that some researchers have finally discovered the answer to this technical conundrum.
According to a Scientific American article, researcher Alexander Bardi-Spröwitz of Germany’s Max Planck Institute did something that many roboticists haven’t yet done: designing a legged robot utilizing avian biology. The fundamental reason why bots struggle to walk on two legs, according to Bardi-Spröwitz, is because biologists “do not describe animal anatomy in engineering-friendly words.”
After meeting veterinary scientist Monica Daley from the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom, his idea would take on fresh life. Together, they proposed leveraging Daley’s extensive knowledge of animal mobility and Bardi-robotics Spröwitz’s expertise to create nimbler robots. As a consequence, they created BirdBot, a two-legged robot that is significantly nimbler than any previous bipedal robot before it.
The findings of Daley and Bardi-Sprowitz were published in the journal Science Robotics, in which they are fairly telling. The problem they found out with bipedal robots was the sky-high energy needs used to make them walk like human. But if they design these machines according to avian biology, the energy needed can be reduced significantly.
The ultimate result is a highly efficient gait that is also steady, sturdy, and easy to manipulate. The two researchers believe that their concept can be scaled up to gigantic robots, which they claim can be used to investigate difficult-to-reach terrain that would otherwise halt wheeled or treaded robots. Consider a two-legged AT-ST walker traversing Endor from the “Star Wars” saga, and you’ll have a fairly good idea of what they’re aiming for.
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