While the Boston Dynamics’ BigDog quadraped has been getting lots of ink and electrons recently (and with good reason), we’ve been spending our time pouring over the work of the Stanford RiSE Project.
It’s so inspiring to see the evolution of the work that’s been done at Bob Full’s Poly-PEDAL Lab at Berkeley, UMich’s RHex hexapods, and the earlier Sprawl bots from Stanford. All of these designs were inspired by nature and insects’ and geckos’ abilities to climb vertical surfaces. Next stop? Climbing on ceilings. Woo-hoo!
Here’s a direct link to the Spinybot II movie.
[And if you haven’t seen the BigDog video yet, it’s definitely worth a look.]