Surely, the human arsenal has seen a host of valuable elements till date, but at the same time, it still hasn’t seen anything more valuable than that desire to grow on a consistent basis. We say this because the stated desire has already fetched the world some huge milestones, with technology emerging as a rather unique member of the group. The reason why technology’s credentials are so anomalous is focused on its skill-set, which was unprecedented enough to realize all the possibilities for us that we couldn’t have imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, a closer look should be able to reveal how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence and made it the ultimate centerpiece of every horizon. Now, having such a powerful tool run the show did scale up our experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after reaching so far ahead, this prodigious concept called technology will somehow continue delivering the right goods. The same has grown to become a lot more evident over the recent past, and assuming one new experiment shakes out just like we envision, it will only propel that trend towards bigger heights in the near future and beyond.

The researching team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has successfully developed a system, which makes an off-the-shelf quadruped robot nimble enough to walk a narrow balance beam. Up until now, most modern quadruped robots, featuring a torso and four legs that each had a rounded foot, demanded at least three of their feet to stay on the ground at all times, if they were to avoid tipping over. This limitation is exactly what has kept the technology from proving its utility across a relatively rough terrain. Talk about how the new research promises to solve the stated problem, published in Enhanced Balance for Legged Robots Using Reaction Wheels, the study employed a reaction wheel actuator (RWA) system that mounts to the back of a quadruped robot. Using its novel controlling mechanism, the RWA system ensured the robot was able to maintain optimal balance without requiring its feet to be in a particular position. The stated paper even delved into a couple of practical experiments, where the researchers tried to validate their approach by placing two RWAs on a commercial Unitree A1 robot—one on the pitch axis and one on the roll axis—to provide control over the robot’s angular momentum. Once the entire thing was ready, they ran it through some simulated situations like dropping the robot upside down from nearly half a meter. Here, the system banked upon RWA to reorient itself mid-air and land on its feet. After getting a proof of robot’s improved resilience against sudden impacts, they moved on to test its balancing capacity, a test which saw it walking along a 6-centimeter-wide balance beam.

“You basically have a big flywheel with a motor attached,” said Zachary Manchester, an assistant professor in the RI and head of the Robotic Exploration Lab. “If you spin the heavy flywheel one way, it makes the satellite spin the other way. Now take that and put it on the body of a quadruped robot.”

While the footprint of quadruped robots is currently restricted to research labs, there is an expectation for them to become widely available commercial-use products that can be used in high-stakes scenarios, such as search-and-rescue missions.

“Quadrupeds are the next big thing in robots,” Manchester said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more of them in the wild in the next few years.”