In the decade since the start of combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has relied increasingly on robots. Drones and bomb-removal bots have been designed to keep troops out of harm's way. Now the U.S. Department of Defense is looking for sleeker, faster robots that can assist with a wider range of missions.
The Cheetah, pictured at the right, is one of the new breeds under development. Real cheetahs, which can sprint up to about 120 kilometers per hour, are the fastest-running animals; the robot, made by Boston Dynamics in Waltham, Mass., reaches nearly 30 kilometers per hour, making it the fastest-legged robot.
This robo cat may one day see action on the battlefield as a scout that can operate in rougher terrain than today's wheeled robots. For now, though, engineers run it on a treadmill and are using it as a way to learn how to help quadruped robots maintain their balance while moving quickly. Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert says, for instance, that working on the Cheetah has “forced us to rethink how a back works in locomotion.” The robot mimics the real thing in flexing and unflexing its back on every step to increase its stride and running speed. Now the investigators are tweaking the flexion to see which modifications improve the motion most.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is sponsoring Boston Dynamics's work through its Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program, hopes to see a free-running prototype by the end of this year.