A team of engineers from Sorbonne University in Paris must have been watching the Terminator movies when they came up with the idea for a robot that can keep walking with a broken leg.
The engineers have created a six-legged robot capable of teaching itself to walk when its leg is damaged, is able to do so in less than two minutes, according to BBC News.
"This new technology will enable more robust, effective, autonomous robots," the team said.
The robot's system is based on the ways that an animal with a broken limb is able to walk on its remaining appendages. However, learning to walk again with a damaged limb is more complicated for a robot because the program must know the velocity and acceleration of each joint every second. Changing these factors to make up for a broken part can be challenging, Geek reported.
The legs of the test robot, referred to as a hexapod, are powered by 18 motors. 13,000 possible ways of walking, or gaits, were pre-calculated and listed on an index depending on the amount of time each leg was on the ground. When a leg was broken, the robot looked through the list of gaits and chose several where it had to use the damaged leg the least. After measuring its speed with each potential gait, the bot chose the best option and began walking again.
The engineers' robot is not the only machine being programmed to walk like animals. Big Dog, created by Boston Dynamics and funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and military contracts, has the ability to move in a variety of challenging terrains, BBC News reported.
Dr. Fumiya Iida, of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, said Sorbonne University's six-legged robot, Big Dog, and other self-learning robots have other potential uses.
"There are lots of applications beyond the military," Iida said. "You can think of robots in extreme environments, so not only in warfare, but in space such as robots on the Moon and Mars, and in nuclear power plants. Think of Fukushima, for example, where humans can't go."
