Festo's Newest Robot Is a Hopping Bionic Kangaroo

Every year, Festo comes up with innovative and fantastical new robot designs as part of its "Bionic Learning Network," which seeks to use "principles from nature to provide inspiration for technical applications." In practice, this means developing all kinds of spectacular robotic animals, including thisabsolutely amazing flying seagull.

For the last few years, Festo has been secretly working in their sprawling German laboratory lair on their most ambitious bioinspired robot yet: an unstoppable (we assume) hopping robotic kangaroo.

BionicKangaroo is able to realistically emulate the jumping behavior of real kangaroos, which means that it can efficiently recover energy from one jump to help it make another jump. Without this capability, kangaroos (real ones) would get very very tired very very quickly, but by using their tendons like elastic springs, the animals can bound at high speeds efficiently for substantial periods of time.

BionicKangaroo emulates this with an actual elastic spring, which partially "charges" the legs on landing. The entire robotic animal weighs just 7 kilograms and stands a meter high, but it can jump 0.4 meter vertically and 0.8 meters horizontally, which is fairly impressive.

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWiNlWk1Muw#t=25

by: https://spectrum.ieee.org !