Perhaps you thought the four-legged BigDog robot wasn’t eerily lifelike enough. That’ll change soon. BigDog’s makers are working on a new quadruped that moves faster than any human and is agile enough to “chase and evade.”
Boston Dynamics, maker of the Army’s BigDog robotic mule, announced today that Darpa has awarded it a contract to build a much faster and more fearsome animal-like robot, Cheetah.
As the name implies, Cheetah is designed to be a four-legged robot with a flexible spine and articulated head (and potentially a tail) that runs faster than the fastest human. In addition to raw speed, Cheetah’s makers promise that it will have the agility to make tight turns so that it can “zigzag to chase and evade” and be able to stop on a dime.
Cheetah builds off work on the company’s previous four legged animal bot, BigDog. It was built as a kind of unmanned pack mule, designed to carry equipment for troops on the battlefield. The robotic donkey could carry 300 lbs. over 13 miles on flat ground, take a swift kick and keep on moving. It’s creepy, lifelike movement can be seen on a number of videos online, climbing over hills and snow and hiking alongside soldiers, using GPS coordinates as its waypoints.
via Darpa’s Cheetah-Bot Designed to Chase Human Prey | Danger Room | Wired.com.
I have one word for you if you are being chased by this bad boy... bolas. Even if it comes equipped with line cutters to get itself free, three trained humans with bolas (which are very cheap to make, by the way) could take it down. Of course, you have to have know the thing is hunting you to be prepared. Not sure what it is supposed to do when it catches you. Does it eat you? Explode? Leap upon you?
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Anybody remember "Ravage" from the first Transformers in the Mid-1980's? Soundwave would say, "LASERBEAK, RAVAGE: EJECT. OPERATION: DESTROY THE HUMANS." Ah, the good ol' days, when all you had to be worried about was nuclear annihilation. Or your Walkman and its nefarious tapes.
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