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We’ve seen plenty of robot appendages designed to decrease exertion, from futuristic exoskeletons that can allow you to climb thousands of steps without breaking a sweat to arm braces that can take the load off at the car factory when working overhead.
Now, a team of engineers in Shenzhen, China, has taken a dramatically different approach — by taking inspiration from a creature in Greek mythology with the body of a horse and the torso of a human. Or possibly from an unflattering Cory Doctorow metaphor building on the same folklore.
In video demonstrations released alongside a paper published in the International Journal of Robotics Research last month, an engineer can be seen walking around a university campus with a two-legged, centaur-inspired appendage striding along behind him.
The robot’s two spindly legs appear to struggle to keep up with the marching human at the front. But as soon as the wearer climbs some stairs, the approach’s key advantage over, say, a pair of wheels, becomes apparent.
“Experimental evaluation results demonstrate that the Centaur robot effectively adapts to varying human walking directions and speeds while seamlessly collaborating with the human to traverse diverse terrains,” the researchers from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China wrote in their paper.
The team found that their approach allowed a wearer to save plenty of energy, or “metabolic cost,” compared to wearing a regular backpack that weighed 44 pounds, similar to the centaur robot.
The researchers argued that while autonomous robots such as robodogs are “being actively explored as load-transport solutions without direct human involvement,” the approach comes with some drawbacks, like the need to “navigate reliably in complex environments where a prior map is unavailable.” Payload capacity is also limited, and could greatly cut into battery power.
“Under current limitations in autonomous navigation, endurance, and payload capacity, autonomous robots still face challenges in fully performing load-carriage tasks,” they wrote.
Their centaur approach, however, could effectively take the load off without compromising too much on navigation and payload capacity, they argue.
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