The World's Coolest Robots
As man-hunting cyborgs, liquid metal police officers, or fussy nags, movie robots run with the humans, when not chasing after them. The real-life robots that we are used to seeing, though, are clunky, limited, and sometimes downright embarrassing (action starts at 0:50):
Not exactly the Terminator.
One company however, has been producing robots that are drastically more mobile and more life-like than anything we are used to seeing. Over the past several years, Boston Dynamics has been creating robots with vastly superior mobility and strength using the design concept of biomimetics: studying and mimicking natural animal physiology.
Perhaps the most striking of these robots is a human body. You have to watch it move to realize how dramatically life-like it can be:
Biomimetics as a field is based on a simple idea. Nature, through millions of years of evolutionary selection, has perfected animal designs to function in the Earth's environment. Humans, for example, are good at bipedal locomotion (two-legged walking) because of thousands of generations of the best walkers out-living (really, out-reproducing) the less able and passing on these superior genetic traits. As smart as we are, human engineers often can't design better solutions from scratch.
Instead, we can study the patterns of muscle in a leg, realize how well they work and copy them. We can watch how a horse naturally walks, balances and reacts to external forces to build a more stable quadruped. Observing the running motion of a cheetah helps us understand its speed.
Boston Dynamics has used biomimetics to produce several robots with amazing capabilities. Their mechanical "BigDog" can climb hills covered in debris, slosh through mud and snow banks, stumble but remain standing when kicked full-force by an human, and even get back up after slipping on ice (fast-forward to 0:30):
Their mechanical cheetah is capable of sprinting faster than Usain Bolt:
In a feat of reverse-evolution, a different company with a confusingly similar name, Boston Engineering, moved biomimetics from the land back to the water. Their biomimetic tuna fish caused a splash with the Department of Homeland Security.
This is what the future of large robots will look like. Big, tough, muscular machines that are able to run faster than us, remain standing or get up quickly, and carry more than we can, while surviving in rough terrain. Scary. And very cool.
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