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Running Robots of Future May Learn From World’s Best Two-Legged Runners: Birds
Researchers studying how birds run hope to use what they learn to improve how robots run.
Credit: OSU News
Oregon State University (OSU) researchers have studied how birds are able to run while minimizing energy cost, avoiding falls or injury, and maintaining speed and direction with the goal of developing better running robots.
"Birds appear to be the best of bipedal terrestrial runners, with a speed and agility that may trace back 230 million years to their dinosaur ancestors," says OSU professor Jonathan Hurst.
Although evolution has shaped running birds into different sizes and skeletal structures, the OSU researchers found their running styles are essentially the same. The researchers focused on five species of birds and developed a computer model that closely matches that behavior.
"We should ultimately be able to encode this understanding into legged robots so the robots can run with more speed and agility in rugged terrain," says OSU researcher Christian Hubicki.
Running birds are very energy efficient because they allow their upper bodies to bounce around, changing their leg speed to stay upright. However, modern robots are usually built with an emphasis on total stability, which often includes maintaining a steady gait. This technique can be energy-intensive and sometimes limits robots' mobility.
The researchers say robotic control approaches "must embrace a more relaxed notion of stability, optimizing dynamics based on key task-level priorities without encoding an explicit preference for a steady gait."
From OSU News
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