Here we see, courtesy of CalTech and Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute, a humanoid robot walking around with a drone on its back.
At first, as the robot bends at the waist, I thought this was going to be my worst nightmare:
Yeah, I thought the robot was going to take off. I didn’t realize it’s being used as a launchpad for the drone.
So what’s going on here? Earlier we looked at that drone, which is CalTech’s ATMO. It’s a quadrotor drone that can transition from flying to driving, thanks to its rotor-wheels.
The idea here is that the humanoid robot adds a third mobility style to ATMO, allowing it to move through more types of environments. “Right now, robots can fly, robots can drive, and robots can walk. Those are all great in certain scenarios,” says Aaron Ames, Director of CalTech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST). “But how do we take those different locomotion modalities and put them together into a single package, so we can excel from the benefits of all these while mitigating the downfalls that each of them have?”
My question is, how long will it be until the drone doesn’t have to disconnect from the humanoid ‘bot at all, and the two can just fly together? Maybe a robot dog would be a better candidate for a flight-enabled ‘bot. After all, there are already agile wheeled robot dogs out there, and both China and the U.S. are experimenting with attaching machine guns to them. What could go wrong?