We’re still a ways away from electric sheep roaming the fields pretending to bleat but robotics researchers continue to look to nature for four-legged inspiration. Meet Cheetah-Cub, a European Commission-funded research project, out of Swiss University the École Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne‘s biorobotics lab, that’s about the size of a house cat.
As its name suggests, Cheetah-Cub takes its cues from feline morphology with strings replacing tendons and actuators sited in the legs to do the work of muscles. The result is a robot that runs like a cat and is, according to its inventor Alex Sproewitz, the fastest robot for its size (under 30kg). To look at it’s like a miniature and less scary version of Boston Dynamic’s terrifying Big Dog bot. The latter is likely faster, being much taller, but for a bot with a mere 0.15m leg-length Cheetah-Cub can really go some — hitting a max of 1.42m/s or almost seven body lengths per second.
To read the original article: Cheetah-Cub Is A Cat-Like Quadruped That’s The Fastest Bot Of Its Size | TechCrunch
