Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
Salto Jumping Robot Now Sticks Landing!
Salto, everyone's favorite real-life hopping robot (as opposed to the fictional hopping robots, see below) has not only mastered precision hopping.
(Salto Precision Hopping Robot)
Salto now sticks the landing!
(Salto Robot Sticks The Landing)
Crazy, right? But what makes it crazy is that this incredibly dynamic little robot is landing on this teeny tiny foot. In the video, you can see Salto landing on its essentially one-dimensional bar foot, but according to the ICRA paper it’s also capable of landing on just a point foot, although its thrusters do struggle a bit to keep it upright. Most of the work on the landing is done by the robot while it’s in mid air, using the same hardware from the previous iteration—namely, a spinning inertial tail plus a couple of propeller thrusters for multi-axis stability.As impressive as the landing is, it’s just half of what’s new here. As you saw in the video, the other thing is the better control that Salto now has over where it’s going, enabling it to target its jumps to specific places. This capability derives from the combination of precise leaping to targets and balanced landing; they allow Salto to have much finer control of its next jump since it gets a chance to land and accurately aim for its target, as opposed to when it’s bouncing. The robot has been able to reduce the standard deviation from its landing target from 9 centimeters all the way down to 1.6 cm, meaning that it can now handle small targets like tree branches—we can’t wait to see that in action.
(Via IEEE Spectrum)
Admit it - you want to read about hopping robots! In his 1954 novel Lucky Star and the Oceans of Venus, Isaac Asimov knew you would, but they didn't exist yet. So, he writes about the fictional hoppers:
Hoppers are probably the most grotesque forms of transportation ever invented. They consist of a curved body, just large enough to hold a man at the controls. There was a four-bladed rotor above and a single metal leg, rubber-tipped, below. It looked like some giant wading bird gone to sleep with one leg folded under its body. Lucky touched the leap knob and the hopper's leg retracted. Its body sank till it was scarcely seven feet from the ground while the leg moved up into the hollow tube that pierced the hopper just behind the control panel. The leg was released at the moment of maximum retraction with a loud click, and the hopper sprang thirty feet into the air...
STILL not ready to stop reading about hopping robots? Well, jump right into this list:
- Prototype Jockey-Ridden Hopping Robot- Precision Urban Hopper Robot Must 'Stick' Landings
- Precision Urban Hopper Leaps Fence Video
- 'Air Hopper' Robot Grasshopper
- Disney Hopping Robot, From Disney Research
- Just Eat And Starship Bring You Food Via Robot
- China Delivery Robot Development Quickens During COVID-2019 Outbreak
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/23/2020)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )
Related News Stories - (" Robotics ")
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto
Blue collar bot.
HandelBot Helps Two-Handed Robots Learn Piano
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
Woven Fiber Electronic Skin For Robots
'... all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.' - Harl Vincent, 1934.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
I Need An Outdoor Spherical Displays
'Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre...'
Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
Muxcard Redditor's DIY Credit Card-Sized Computer
It's a computer, but just barely.
'Soft Assembly' Fashions That Fashion Themselves On The Wearer
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
ISS Plagued By Leak - Again!
'There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel...'
Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large
The Shape of Things To Come
Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark
'I can see in the dark, Case.'
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
AIs Turn Marxist Under Bad Management
'It was a general strike of the robots...'
Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
Nifty Folding Electric Bicycles!
'Separate paths were provided for them...'
