One-legged gimp bot
Robots on Yahoo! News Photos Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006
Toyota Motors Corp. …. a prototype of one-legged robot is shown in Japan. Without using a motor, the 1-meter (3.3 feet)-tall robot can leap 4 centimeter (1.6 inch) high with its extra joint installed at its tiptoe…more...
I suppose I would not want this one-legged robot in an ass-kicking contest but…
This pogo robot idea floating around since the 80s. It’s not a crazy as it first seems. Marc H. Raibert/Leg Laboratory of Carnagie-Mellon made a unipod pogo robot which you may have see—the final visualization of the actual functioning model won 1992 Sigraph. Athough one-legged hooper do not exist in nature, these function one-legged kangaroos and were speedy, maneuverable robots rather than the painfully, slow-moving robots you see in Japan.
See a YouTube video of a non-Carnagie-Mellon One-Leg Hopper Robot.
Biologist Robert Full supported the whole pogo-stick robot theory in Durham, N.C., recently at a meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. He suggested, “It doesn’t matter how many legs an animal has, how they’re constructed or how the body is connected to them. It makes no difference what an animal’s skeleton is made of. Legs basically work like sticks with springs attached, Full said, flexing to absorb energy and then releasing it to propel the animal forward. …Despite their apparent differences, they all run the same way. This turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful method” ...more….from polyPEDAL…
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