Boston Dynamics All Set To Unleash 'Cheetah' and 'Atlas'

Boston Dynamics is a company which is fast gaining a reputation of creating unthinkable bionic machines and robots. This robot manufacturing firm took us all by surprise when it released the bionic beast “BigDog”. This robot is capable of running on four legs, carrying heavy loads, climb steep slopes and sustain in all types of terrain. The DARPA was hugely impressed by this digital biomechanical wonder and so it funded the entire research for the BigDog. Now, Boston Dynamics is developing two new mean machines: one of them is a fast sprinting quadruped Cheetah and the other one is a full size complex humanoid Atlas.

The Cheetah robot will be a super fast, agile and athletic unmanned machine with a body resembling the big cat. The Cheetah will have a flexible spinal cord, a well defined head, neck and even a tail. It will be able to perform all the heavy duty tasks of the BigDog. In addition to that, it can run very fast hence the name Cheetah. It will be capable of accelerating to extraordinary speeds in a matter of seconds. It is designed and programmed in such a way that it can easily manage to take sharp turns and vary its speed at any given instant. These features will enable it to chase and track a hostile target or to escape and evade a dangerous situation. Boston Dynamics have claimed that the Cheetah will be faster than any of the existing legged robots and even faster than most of the human athletes. Though the claim sounds audacious, Boston Dynamics have proved in the past that they can achieve the unimaginable targets.

The other robot under development in the R&D labs of this company is the freakishly realistic humanoid “Atlas”. It is a full sized robot with intricate details and detailed structure that makes it look very much human. It will possess two legs, two arms and a torso. It can easily cover rough terrains. It will have both bipedal motion like human beings and a provision for quadruped crawling. So the Atlas will move on two legs on easy to maneuver surfaces, move sideways to creep in through narrow paths and crawl on all four when extra balance and support is required. Atlas will be deriving some of its hardware features from its predecessor Petman which was developed by the company for the US army. You must be wondering that what is so special about Atlas when Honda has developed Asimo such a long time ago. The answer to this question is that unlike Asimo and most of the humanoids which use a static motion control techniques, the Atlas makes use of dynamic control mechanism. Its movements will be very similar to us, with long strides, weight shifting at every step and a heel to toe motion. This will enable the Atlas to have greater agility and speed while maintaining proper centre of gravity.

Boston Dynamics are developing these two machines as a part of the contracts handed to it by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The two bionic robots could be used in many non military applications such as firefighting, hi tech agriculture, emergency services, etc.

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