Crack open the King James and turn to Isiah 6:2 and you’ll find the following: “Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” Biblically accurate Angles are—so the memes suggest—supposed to be terrifying. So why is this robot that’s doing its best impression of one so cute?
I’m kind of kicking myself for anthropomorphising a hunk of metal, but come on, look at it go. It’s a’lollopin’ around like nobody’s business. And somehow, despite its bumbling, meandering gait, it manages to keep on track pretty damn well—whatever track it’s tasked to follow, that is. That’s helped by the fact that it has cameras attached to its many expandable legs.
Particularly impressive is its ability to not just traverse various floor plains (I can do that too, no sweat), but also climb up walls by jutting its little arms out rapidly. That arm jutting is how the whole thing moves, looking a little like one of those Hoberman sphere expanding ball toys everyone had in the ’90s and early 2000’s.
The robot is part of a family of robots called Argus and is being made by the General Robotics Lab at Duke University (via Associated Press). Looking to the relevant scientific paper’s abstract, Argus is a “family of spherical robots designed to explore the effects of increasing dynamic symmetry”, this being “the uniformity of a robot’s attainable center-of-mass accelerations.”
Apparently, using such dynamic symmetry “consistently improved trajectory tracking, task success, robustness, resiliency, and energy efficiency… These results show that designing robots for symmetry not only in morphology but also in their attainable dynamics provides a powerful and general pathway toward agility, robustness, and multifunctionality in uncertain terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments.”
In other words, it seems focusing on keeping things nice and balanced (dynamically symmetrical) from the ground up in a robot’s design can make for a machine that’s mighty capable across different terrains and circumstances.
And that looks hella cute, which is the main thing, if you ask me.
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