New robot dog can keep running without power

We’ve seen plenty of adorable robot dogs in the past few years, even some with adorable weapons of mass destruction on their backs that can adorably murder hundreds of people in a single bark, but this adorable robot dog has a twist. No, it’s not because it looks like a cross between a dog skeleton and madman’s Meccano set, but because this one can keep on running even if its motors aren’t.

Canadian robotics wiz Mickaël Achkar, a student at Switzerland's EPFL research institute, built the experimental dogbot using canine biology as a template. The robot’s 3D-printed polymer joints and steel tendons are mechanically coordinated as they would be in a real life biological good boy, and this gives the robot a simultaneously obvious yet unexpected emergent property: it doesn’t always need to use its motors to move.

While testing the robot on a motorized treadmill, Achkar discovered that once it was running at full speed, it didn’t need any power to keep running. The articulated legs simply kept moving, powered only by the movement of the treadmill. This new design of robot could allow for vastly simplified control systems and much lighter mechanical components, which could drastically reduce the cost and complexity of new robots, or even robotic limb replacements. Plus the ping pong ball feet are just adorable.

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