DARPA’s robot toy

March 20, 2008

Where's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) money going? How about to this cool four-legged robot from Boston Dynamics? The video shows a robot with a payload greater than its own weight, and shows the BD team putting its through such tests as walking on ice, in snow, leaf-covered hillsides, piles of cinderblocks, dry creek beds, and more. The thing is just unbelievable, and shows one future vector of product development for defense and security. (P.S., if the YouTube video below is blocked, you can read up on the BigDog robot here, where there's a link to download the video from Boston Dynamics' site).  wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355">Of interest is that this project builds upon more than 20 years of work. Boston Dynamics was founded by Marc Raibert, who prior to creating Boston Dynamics, was a professor at MIT in the "Leg Lab", which was part of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the school. As far back as 1986, Raibert was working on "legged robots that balance."   --- Geoff