Meet SALTO: Most Vertically Agile Robot Ever
UC Berkeley roboticists introduce SALTO - their tiny 3.5-ounce robot can leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps in a row, resulting in the highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded. The agility of the robot opens new pathways of locomotion that were not previously attainable. To compare the vertical agility of robots and animals, the researchers developed a new metric to measure vertical agility. SALTO (which stands for saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles) has a robotic vertical jumping agility of 1.75 meters per second, which is higher than the vertical jumping agility of a bullfrog (1.71 meters per second).
Transcript
00:00:01 (light piano music) (upbeat electronic music) - This is SALTO, which stands for Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles. Saltatorial being the Latin word for jumping, and it's the word biologists use when referring to jumping animals. The special thing about this robot is that it can jump higher and faster than any other robot that's out there right now.
00:00:25 It has 56% more vertical jumping agility. SALTO can jump better than a human. It can jump higher. It can jump to one meters starting from a full standstill. SALTO is not just impressive because it can do this big jump to a meter high. Once it does that jump, SALTO jumps again, so we can do this really high power jump behavior continuously and chain together these maneuvers
00:00:54 made out of large leaps. So jumping off a wall, you can actually gain height that you weren't able to have before. (steady electronic music) What I really enjoy about researching robotics is being able to look at animals for new ideas, and use those to create better robots. SALTO is inspired by a galago, which is a bushbaby. The galago can jump to like 1.74 meters or so. Biologists have found animals adapted specifically for
00:01:26 jumping have this kind of super crouch posture. The longer they stay in a crouch, the more energy they can transfer into their tendons and more energy they can return for jumping. So we built into SALTO the capability for a super crouch. What that allows is to have the motor be able to stretch out the spring and keep the robot crouched for longer. (steady electronic music) Now that SALTO is jumping this well,
00:01:58 what we want to do is try to explore new behaviors. The closest model for what we're trying to do is human parkour. You have these people that like excel at running over buildings, bouncing off of all these crazy obstacles, using stuff that would otherwise be an obstacle like a wall as a feature to help yourself move. Actually, one thing I've noticed while we've been- With the motivation of urban search and rescue,
00:02:23 what we want to do is try to do extended behaviors with SALTO, chain together a series of jumps to get places you weren't able to before. (lively music) In the future, we'd like to be able to take a map of an environment and extract from that, places to jump, good spots for jumping, and then be able to direct SALTO about where to jump, how high, and how far. (lively music)