LittleDog Clips And Outtakes

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 21 of September , 2009 at 1:31 am

Browsing around the MIT website (as I do from time to time so that you don’t have to), I ran across the web page of Katie Byl (that’s “bill”), who is currently working at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab (on stuff like this). Katie used to study legged locomotion at MIT, which involved developing dynamic motions for LittleDog. And sometimes, these motions didn’t quite work out as planned… Also in the following video are clips of LittleDog walking on pegs (“Karate Kid” style), and a slow motion clip of LittleDog bounding up onto terrain:

Incidentally, the reason why LittleDog collapses the way it does is that DARPA gives points for LittleDog’s speed (irrespective of whether it’s upright or not), and LittleDog can increase its speed over a given distance slight by collapsing forward and then stopping the clock. Katie calls this a “dramatic death-dive.” Dramatic indeed.

[ Robot Locomotion @ MIT ]
[ Katie Byl @ MIT ]

Comments (5)

Category: Biorobotics, Humor, Research

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5 Comments

Comment by Alex

Made Monday, 21 of September , 2009 at 6:44 am

I was hoping the pillars would be placed a little more randomly for that part of the video :( It seems as though they were placed at convenient locations based on LittleDog’s walking gait (it didn’t have to really search for footing). But it was still really cool to see anyway.

Comment by Melissa

Made Monday, 21 of September , 2009 at 8:28 pm

Little dog! Way less creepy than big dog. It’s pretty good at walking on those pegs, too! (Much better than I’d do, I’m sure.)

Comment by skeptikality

Made Thursday, 24 of September , 2009 at 7:45 am

No way LittleDog walked those posts. It was faked. Stop motion animation. You can tell by the jerkyness and the lack of sound where all the other normal motion clips do have sound.

Comment by David S.( @seemsArtless )

Made Sunday, 27 of September , 2009 at 9:03 pm

Thanks for the videos! I read this at the same time I read about Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about nanotechnology in our bloodstream, and somehow they seemed to fit together… see http://www.skyontech.com/blog/kurzweil-vs-robots

Comment by single parent ministry

Made Wednesday, 30 of September , 2009 at 5:28 am

Great stuff thanks for posting that. I find Im reading your posts more and more.