Sunday, October 30, 2011

HyQ - IIT's Hydraulic Quadruped Robot - YouTube

This video shows HyQ in some serious action.

It's not quite an invasion, but in recent years we've seen a small parade of quadruped robots strutting out of labs around the world.

In the United States, Boston Dynamics has introduced its now-famous BigDog and, more recently, a bigger bot named AlphaDog.

Early this year, we wrote about FROG, a prototype built in China, and just a few weeks ago we described the SQ1 robot, a South Korean project.

Now it's time to unveil the latest addition to this pack: HyQ is a robot developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), in Genoa.

The machine, built by a team led by Professor Darwin Caldwell, is a hydraulic quadruped (Hence, hy-q) designed to perform highly dynamic tasks such as running and jumping.

Legged locomotion remains one of the biggest challenges in robotics, and the Italian team hopes that their robot can become a platform for research and collaboration among different groups a kind of open source BigDog.

Technics
HyQ's trunk is made of stainless steel and a folded, 3mm thick sheet of aluminum alloy. The 1 m (3.28 feet) long, 50 cm (1.64 feet) wide and 98 cm (3.21 feet) tall robot weighs 90 kg with the hydraulic power supply on board, and 70 kg with external hydraulics.

Hydraulic actuation offers high power density, high torque output and velocity. It also allows for high bandwidth torque control.

The downside is that the components are still rather bulky and not very energy efficient, but that is something the researchers at IIT's Department of Advanced Robotics intend to change.

They also want to make HyQ power-autonomous, endow it with a head with a built in stereo camera and a laser range finder and give it an arm with a gripper.

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