Boston Dynamics, developer of advanced dynamic robots such as BigDog and PETMAN, has been awarded a contract by Sandia National Laboratories to develop the next generation of the Precision Urban Hopper, meaning that Sandia's hopping robots may soon be in combat.
When fully operational, the four-wheeled hopper robots will navigate autonomously by wheel and jump—with one mighty leg—onto or over obstacles of more than 25 feet, said Jon Salton, Sandia program manager.
The development program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense's advanced technology organization, has a 12-month design phase followed by a six-month build phase, with testing and delivery planned for late 2010.
As part of the ongoing DARPA project, Sandia developed the shoebox-sized, GPS-guided, unmanned ground robots.
The robots' demonstrated hopping capability allows the small unmanned ground vehicles to overcome as many as 30 obstacles that are 40 to 60 times their own size. Hopping mobility has been shown to be five times more efficient than hovering when traversing obstacles at heights under 10 meters, which allows longer station-keeping time for the same amount of fuel.
The wheeled robotic platform adapts to the urban environment in real time and provides precision payload deployment to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight and small. Researchers addressed several technical challenges, including appropriate management of shock forces during landing; controlling hop height from varying terrain, including concrete, asphalt, sand and vegetation; and controlling landings to limit tumbling.
An overall goal of the robots is to decrease the number of casualties in combat. To that end, the hopping robots will provide enhanced situational awareness for shaping the outcome of the immediate local combat situation, Salton said. Their compact, lightweight design makes them portable, and their semiautonomous capability greatly reduces the workload burden of the operator.
In addition to providing military assistance, the hopping capabilities of the robots could be used in law enforcement, homeland security, search and rescue applications in challenging terrain, and planetary exploration, Salton said.
"We are delighted to win this project and get a chance to work with Sandia on such a novel and potentially useful robot," said Marc Raibert, president and founder of Boston Dynamics. "The program gives us a chance to apply our special brand of advanced controls and stabilization to a system that can help our warfighters in the near future."
