Cheetah robot Sets Speed Record

DARPA'S Cheetah robot not only is as tough as Usain Bolt but also has Speed. It has now broken its own land speed record of 18 miles per hour (mph).

According to the International Association of Athletics Federation, Bolt set a world speed record for a human in 2009 after reaching a peak speed of 27.78 mph for a 20 meter split during the 100 meter sprint.

The Cheetah - a quadrupedal machine built by Boston Dynamics and backed by Darpa, the US Defence Department's research division, has a slight advantage over Bolt as it ran on a treadmill, the equivalent of a 28.3 mph tail wind. But the most powerful Cheetah used was to swing and lift its legs at a faster rate and not propel itself forward.

The current version of the cheetah robot is powered by an off board hydraulic pump and uses a boom like device to keep it running in the centre of the treadmill. Since March 2012 the increase in speed is due to improved control algorithms and powerful pump.

"The most difficult terrain demands the use of legs, as legs can step over both high obstacles and deep ditches," DARPA said as quoted in PC Mag. "But coordinating the swing and lift of mechanical legs is more difficult than making wheels turn or tracks roll, and previous legged robots have been slow compared to wheeled or tracked ones."

"Modeling the robot after a cheetah is evocative and inspiring, but our goal is not to copy nature," DARPA program manager Gill Pratt said in a statement. Instead, the agency is attempting to understand and engineer robots to duplicate certain core capabilities of living organisms, like efficient locomotion, manipulation of objects, and the ability to adapt to environments, Pratt said.

"Our real goal is to create a robot that moves freely outdoors while it runs fast. We are building an outdoor version that we call WildCat, that should be ready for testing early next year," Dr. Alfred Rizzi, the technical lead for the Cheetah effort, was quoted in wired.com