There have been running bipedal robots before, but their movement is mechanical very robot-like indeed. Ryuma Niiyama of MIT's Robot Locomotion Group wants to build a flexible, agile robot with less of a mechanical gait and more of a sprinter's-type stride, which means that it runs as human-like as possible.
The robot, very appropriately named Athlete, sports an artificial musculoskeletal system that mirrors human muscles in the leg, hip, lower abdomen, and booty and has a springy elastic blade foot like those seen on prosthetic running legs.
Niiyama's aims Athlete have seven sets of actuator-driven artificial muscles in each leg, equipped with touch sensors on each foot and an inertial measurement unit on the torso for detecting the body's orientation. With the aid of a harness hung from the ceiling, Athlete can currently take up to five steps at about 3.9 feet per second, but then it falls down.
Niiyama--who also worked on Mowgli the bipedal jumping robot--developed Athlete as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tokyo's Department of Mechano-Informatics along with colleagues Satoshi Nishikawa and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
They presented their research last week at the IEEE Humanoids 2010 conference in Nashville, Tenn.