Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Jumping on a pogo stick isn’t as easy as it looks, and it looks quite difficult to begin with. But robotics engineers seem to have identified the issues to create a hopping robot.
Their robot, which is smaller than a human thumb, can bound across ice, wet surfaces, and uneven soil. It can even hop around on a dynamically tilting surface.
The key to these agile acrobatics is a single springy leg, which continuously propels the robot off the ground like a pogo stick, and 4 flapping wings, which provide lift and allow it to remain upright.
At the peak of the robot’s arc through the air, it estimates its landing position and calculates the take off velocity of its next jump. Flapping its wings allows it to adjust orientation to strike the ground at the correct angle to move at the desired speed and direction.
The little machine can leap about 20cm in the air and traverse laterally at about 30cm per second. Due its light weight (less than 1g) and excellent energy efficiency, its creators say it could carry a load about 10 times greater than a similar-sized flying robot.
While the design currently relies on an external source of energy, the findings hold promise for future autonomous insect-scale hopping robots.
“Being able to put batteries, circuits, and sensors on board has become much more feasible with a hopping robot than a flying one,” says Yi-Hsuan (Nemo) Hsiao of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, co-lead author of a paper describing the robot in Science Advances.
“Our hope is that one day this robot could go out of the lab and be useful in real-world scenarios.”
Perhaps tiny hopping robots could one day squeeze into and traverse spaces, such as collapsed buildings, that are inaccessible to their larger counterparts.
