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11-lb Robot Can Jump 30 Feet Into the Air
Ruvim writes "Boston Dynamics has developed a 'Sand Flea' 11-lb robot that drives like an RC car, but when it needs to, it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented during flight to improve the view from the video uplink and to control landings."
Amir... I think we have fleas!!!
One day Boston Dynamics is going to combine all these robots together and kill us all.
It's a nice RC toy, but how is it a robot? Just having a receiver, an electric motor to drive and some spring mechanism and a person controlling it over radio makes a robot?
You can't handle the truth.
tries to work out GPE ... too confused to do it with units based on an 11th century King's knackerbag.
tries to convert units to metric ... too drunk.
conclusion: I for one welcome our robotic howitzer overlords.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You can see the camera do take cuts before it jumps most times. Either it's chargin' its laser and they cut for time, or it's got other issues. (it may take awhile to say, charge a compressed spring piston)
Another possible angle is it may only be able to set up for the jump if it's right-side-up, and we never see it flipping itself over, so if it found itself upside-down, it could be in trouble?
But those jumps are quite impressive. I got the impression though that it could only do one height of jump, like when you see it jump off the top of the building. I was expecting a short hop to get it off the edge, but it cranks way back and catapults way up and off. So it seems to have a ways to go, development-wise.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...and where can i get one?
but really, what is the point? We already have controlled flight technology, why waste time on uncontrollable flight?
Why do we still drive trucks when we have helicopters? For a given size, much longer range/endurance/payload than a flying vehicle. Think of a ground vehicle/camera system not being blocked by a fence or compound wall instead of full flight. I imagine it is also much quieter.
Having options is good.
And cheaper. War is always about money.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Having options is good.
True dat. And if we're ever attacked by the armies of King Koopa we'll be damn glad we have this hopping robot!
The enemies of Democracy are
Ok, so they're not spider mines... yet. But anything that moves and jumps in the air is just begging to be used as a weapon. Geneva Convention not withstanding.
Life is not for the lazy.
Flight uses a LOT more energy, and wings/rotors can get damaged on landing. Besides the obvious "wait for terrorists to walk by and jump on their backs and stab them in the neck", you can also use this for maybe roof inspection (suddenly no more personal injury), or maybe a cheap way to spread an area with fire retardant, or bring food to people trapped atop buildings by roaming zombies.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The Mach-5 was the first thing I thought about when I read the title, but this is definitely something else.
The second thing I thought: "Do not give this to my children. I'll be climbing on the roof every day."
Imagine Boston Dynamic merging this sand flea bot with their bio dog bot -- it would be an awesome jumping dawg !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
back home, and they arent much bigger than a receiver, an electric motor, and some spring mechanism.
"I get up, and nothing gets me down.
You got it tough, I’ve seen the toughest soul around
And I know, just how it feels.
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real
Oh can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine, I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?
Might as well jump. Jump !
Might as well jump.
Go ahead, jump. Jump !
Go ahead, jump.
"
-- robot Van Halen
Robot Eddie Van Halen
Robot Alex Van Halen
Robot Michael Anthony
Robot David Lee Roth
If the future of /. is flash videos, then I'm going to have to leave.
Not gonna watch video, not going to load flash. I prefer articles and discussions.
Thanx in advance.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
They cut the video pretty much before any single jump. Plus, they don't have a good shot of the last flight. The jumps are cool but any of us could do a jumping machine that "just jumps". The hard thing is to make the whole package.
Come on, don't tell me they didn't had time for it. They are a big company and should watch what they release.
This reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc
Maybe Boston Dynamics is just taking a piss out of DARPA.
That thing is Awesome!
Legged locomotion is incredibly difficult to engineer with weakly defined benefits. Use some wheels, and when the obstacle is to big, just jump. I really like that, that might be the one way to do it. That is: for small drones, operating outdoors. However, it may not translate so well to indoors environments, or to larger robots, or load-carrying ones.
no one claimed it was autonomous or intelligent or whatever. just a demonstrator for a mode of locomotion: a small wheeled vehicle that jumps really high and doesn't break in the process. Autonomously navigating that thing would pose one major problem: how is it supposed to know where it is going when jumping onto higher terrain? Like, the roof in the video, how could it see there was in fact a roof and not a bottomless pit? it could possibly team up with an airborne unit relaying its extended field of view. Or, you could make these things real cheap, and let them "lemming" into unknown terrain on the basis of trial-and-error and swarm intelligence.
It looks really cool, but there is a cut between every time the device is posed to jump and it jumps. A camera change at 0:09. A really weird one at 0:18 where the camera doesn't move but light changes so you know there was a cut. The jump at 0:35 doesn't look like it has a cut but it is a smaller jump too. The next jump has one at 0:51. So 4 jumps with three cuts between the preparing to jump and the jump. Not saying it is a fake, but it has many attributes that a faked video would have.
Afghanistan walls have been increase to 31 feet.
The spindly protrusions off of the wheels, are those somehow helping to stabilize the flight trajectory after launching? How come they don't cover the plastic wheels with some kind of rubber tread to increase traction and decrease the scratching/scrambling noise the plastic makes. I would imagine a bit of stealth would be necessary for the environments this will be used in. Or would that not actually help in the dirt/sand?
That said, launching off of a roof and landing on concrete and still working perfectly afterward... that's some solid engineering. Most things would have shattered into about a million pieces after that.