Video Friday: Stanford SprawlBots

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 17 of April , 2009 at 2:30 am

Here’s something old but cool that I ran across… These are a series of robots called Sprawl robots, from Stanford back between 2001ish and 2004ish. Sprawl robots were designed to test out hybrid foot/leg designs, and they utilized a hexapod configuration and pneumatic toes that made them deceptively speedy little buggers. After the pneumatic version came iSprawl, where the “i” THANK GOD FOR ONCE ACTUALLY STANDS FOR SOMETHING and is not just a prefix that got tossed on there because Apple does it and that makes it cool. It stands for independent! iSprawl is untethered and runs on batteries and makes for a pretty badass little remote control hexapod:

If you’re wondering where this project ended up going, remember these bots and these bots? Yep, Sprawl robots are their distant ancestors. It’s robot evolution in action.

[ Sprawl ]
[ iSprawl ]

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Category: Biorobotics, Research

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