What do you get when you combine a pogo stick, a quadcopter, and engineering students from the University of Toronto? This thing, apparently– a “monopedal hopping robot” that uses a spikey, pivoting foot pad tensioned by what look like elastic bands to keep it upright on all terrain from soft sand to hard ice.
It’s an interesting concept. The thrust from the four propellers is what gives the energy to get the robot moving, but its pogo-like hopping is entirely down to the spring-loaded single legged “landing gear”. Early iterations just used a spike on the end of that leg, but that failed in ways that some might find humorous, which you will see if you watch the video embedded below. Giving the monopod an actual foot with some traction and the ability to pivot and match the terrain works much better– now not only can this robot leap tall fences in a single bound, an errant ice patch won’t send it skittering away.
This isn’t the first one-legged robot we’ve seen; some only use their leg while others have wings, but this odd quadcopter is the first we’ve seen to brave Canadian winter.
As if bouncing betty wasn’t scary enough…
I know a place where they can make good use of an army of hopping claymores.
Especially if you add a random pattern of bounce height, distance, and sideways bumbling towards the overall intended path and combine it with infrared and acoustic target locking.
On the other hand it’d be close to impossible to use as a FPV device: every „driving“ pilot would barf within minutes, I reckon.
The Wallace Tank is now viable.
Look at 0:13, why does it look like they faked the video by moving a static photo of the robot over the background? It looks like the robot is dragging a “halo” around it where it was cut from the background.
Probably just the AI filter that’s built into the smartphone they filmed this with.
Or perhaps rolling shutter plus heavy motion compensation with the video codec, now that I think about it. Still, pretty weird artifact.
I put my money on YT or other video codec compression artifacts.
I know that look… It’s between-frame interpolation to make slow-motion from regular footage. It gets confused around thin objects. Doubtful it’s monkey business, they just didn’t give them the budget for a proper high-speed camera.
That’s called video compression.
It is worth noting that videos are inherently fake, just 2D documentation of something.
Itd be impressive to ACTUALLY send a drone via a webpage.