The Smorgasbord

The walking quadraped robot is something I saw a few years back in YouTube video, it was called the “Big Dog” and is made by a company called “Boston Dynamics”. This new video from March 2008 shows how much more this thing has (insanely) improved during that time. It can run, jump, walk sideways, and the variety of terrains they are testing this shows how versatile the “Big Dog” is becoming. It’ll be a hundred times more effective than any camel I’ve ever seen. It looks huge in the video, but it says it’s only 240lbs, and the payload it’s carrying is 340 lbs. If they can scale this up – wait until they make a bigger version for troop transport (like the “AT-AT’s” in Star Wars), so much for tanks!

Here’s the “Little Dog” version from a few years back:

Here’s a robot from the same company called “RHex”:

and if you want to see something really freaky – here’s a “robotic snake”: