Video: DARPA's Cheetah Sets a Land-Speed Record for Running Robots

pretty fluid movement there. Id like to ride one of these please

I have a vision in the future our soldiers will be a robotic drone cheeta and simuliar to the cheeta in the movie 'Avatar'. It will be a fast land base attack and so fierce, completely unstoppable!

Yes, the 'fluid' movement of this robot is fantastic!!!

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See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!

I'd like to see how good it will run on relatively uneven surfaces.

It looks amazing, and must have been quite the challenge, however it looks like it would completely trip up if the surface wasn't perfect.

It will be interesting to see the 'out of lab' video

cross this with the dogbot...make it bigger...add lasers..ride it off road

This technology should seriously be applied towards helping disabled people. My brother suffers mental and physical disabilities. I know he'd feel a lot better if he were able to run as fast as non handicapped people or better yet faster.

In order to mimic an animal's speed and mobility, they need to much more closely mimic the animal's muscle structure. I never see the rigid hydraulic design being able to do the job. Muscle, which helps dictate movement and balance, can essentially be broken down into fluid filled sacks of varying pressure. A carbon fiber skeleton could easily be built with rotating joints, as seen in fake knees, shoulders, and hips already in wide medical use. To get this skeleton to move you need to then surround it with artificial muscle, or the fluid filled sacks, and the ability to pull on tendons, or in this instance, wire cables. Using a modified version of the recently introduced no-pulse heart, the pressure in the sacks could be varied to produce balance, movement, and strength.

To visualize this concept better, stand up and in slow motion act as if you're going to jump. Muscles in your legs contract at different rates and intensity. This could easily be accomplished by placing fluid filled sacks around a metal skeleton and varying the pressure by letting the fluid in or out of the sacks, which would also pull on metal cables. Yes, this concept is similar to hydraulics in that it uses pressure, but much more dynamic in that there could be numerous pressure changes happening in different locations all around the skeleton, rather than the skeleton itself being one fixed hydraulic.

the biggest problem, Visualize, is that we can't easily replicate the muscle period. we have compounds that can deform when we pass voltage through them, we also have other amalgams that will tense and relax in the presence of alcohol. but the actual movement has low "torque" compared to the actual energy going into it. that's why cells are so freaking amazing right now.

when you think of your muscle, it has an intricate pipe system that funnels oxygen carrying blood to every single cell. let's bring our thinking down to one small level; one bundle of muscle in your upper arm to be exact. each and every single one of these muscle cells gain nutrients from the blood and the bloodstream, then it manufactures there in it's own self the energy required to contract it's cell layer. every single cell then works in tandem with every other muscle cell in the bundle to contract your arm one way.

basically what i am trying to say is that hydraulics is the closest that we can really get to actually mimicking the power of a muscle. your idea is a good one, you should pursue it to the best of your abilities, but it isn't going to last at all. the reason why muscles can afford to be so strong is because they repair themselves daily, hourly even. if you try to make a muscle out of plastic, rubber, and compressed air, it's going to fall apart after 30 hours because every single one of the bundles has ruptured.

to mars or bust!

@Ghost

Ohhhh....really...

Carbon Nanotube Muscles Strong as Diamond, Flexible as Rubber

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/nanomuscle/

Oh good, so we're teaching them to run us down now. Nice.

I can see one of this on the police force, mauling people down like a chew toy. /(^.^)\

You know DARPA works for the millitary. Youtube FEMA.
RUN!!!!

Now scale it up to lets say 40 feet tall and make five of them that can combine into one big humaniod robot.
Oh and don't forget the sword.

Who will ride motorcycles when you can ride a robotic cheetah? ;)

This robot running is amazing!! I really do think it is winning the race and by no means do I think it cheetah, lol.

..........................................
See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!

The new Segway!

Darpa aka skynet

Fast on a straight level surface: Good for a dragster, useless for much else.

But it's a start.

The motions of an animal are fantastically complex (even our apparently ungainly ones). They are produced by subsystems that make nearly instantaneous analog calculations and fine corrections relatively without conscious thought - often not even requiring a full trip to the brain.

When a machine can make a twisting leap, leopard like, from behind cover to capture another equally agile machine leaping past the cover attempting not to be caught, we are all up a creek.

"I'll be back."

Yeah...great...I would love to see this running me down. What a nightmare scenario we create for ourselves. If the enemy thought we were less than human for using drone aircraft wait until they get a look at the new universal soldier!

Has anyone read Robopocalypse?? ಠ_ಠ

Now their are nano materials being developed at Texas tech that can contract and expand when exposed to different temperatures or chemicals. Wrap a heating unit and some aerogel and something to prevent the aerogel from shattering and you would have an efficient artificial muscle.