A jumpy, collection of wires and metal has the look of the offspring of Wall-E and a pogostick. Titled with the casual prototype name “hopping bot,” the slim, compact robot is as technologically unique as it is kinematic machine on a single leg.The mechanism is able to stand up straight and continue movement without collapsing through a modified Raibert hopping algorithm. The robot can stay moving for up to 19 hops, which the company estimates to be around seven seconds, and is constructed so that it is lightweight, untethered, and passively compliant from a high-endurance spring. Disney and their research department are behind the engineering feat, whose creation brings another layer to robotics’ increasingly autonomous nature. A tiled image from the Disney Research website shows the self-standing robot—though wired up here, possibly to a source of power unrelated to its balance—in various stages of flexible motion.
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A large part of unique self-standing technology is the linear elastic actuator in parallel (LEAP) which essentially makes up for most of the mechanical spring and thus, the robot’s crowning achievement of single-legged mobility. This is just one tech innovation to bring Disney's cartoon characters real life mobility.
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