BigDog is one of the next generation military assist machines in development right now. Big Dog is a research and development project by Boston Dynamics. The Big Dog project is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Boston Dynamics claims Big Dog is the most advanced quadruped robot on earth. BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble and carries a 340 lb load. BigDog can even walk over terrain such as ice and snow to reach its destination. It also has amazing balancing skills, in the video you can watch someone kick Big Dog from the side and it knows how to recover itself without falling over. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight. This is an amazing robot, when the final production model makes it to the troops it will be a huge help in areas where it is unsafe for people to travel. From the U-Tube description
“BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.”
Here is a snake for those of you that don’t like reptiles! It’s not slimy (though snakes never are), and it can’t bite, but it does move like one! Perhaps it even moves better than a snake because it knows how to roll instead of just sliding. This prototype it being studied by the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. This robotic snake has the ability to climb up poles and inside of pipes and perform reconnaissance missions that no human could ever do. This snake robot is even capable of crawling, climbing, and swimming! That’s right, this robot will even climb up cracks or pipes or even swim through water like a real snake! This robot is designed using servos purchasable at hobby stores with some slight modifications. The chassis is built using a simple aluminum frame even you could make. Using common easy to purchase parts make these robots lower cost and easier to repair. Lower cost means it’s easier for people to buy them, and may possibly allow them to be commercially available. But the other cool part is that it may even be cheap enough to build your own simple prototype using the Parallax Propeller chip. The Parallax Propeller chip is perfectly suitable for this application because it even supports video which is necessary on this type of reconnaissance mission. Go for it, I think it a good idea.
