Google-owned Boston Dynamics previewed wheel-leg humanoid robot called Handle, during Abundance360 conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. Boston Dynamics released a HD video of Handle robot, footage demonstrating some of Handle’s brand new tricks operate in difficult environments — on hills, in the snow and over uneven terrain, doing squats, picking up and transporting 100-pound (45kg) crates and jumping hurdles, calling it “nightmare-inducing”.
Read more at IEEE Spectrum: Boston Dynamics Officially Unveils Its Wheel-Leg Robot: “Best of Both Worlds”
Read more on PCMag: VIDEO: Boston Dynamics Shows Off Latest Robot ‘Handle’
Detail about Handle Robot:
- Wheeled Research robot that stands 6.5 feet tall when fully extended, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically.
- Handle uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge.
Read more on Popular Mechanics: Boston Dynamics Reveals Handle, an Amazing New Jumping and Rolling Robot
- Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex.
- Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs, Handle can have the best of both worlds.
Read more at Techcrunch: Boston Dynamics’ Handle robot dominates parkour on wheels in new footage
Now everybody thinks we only do legged robots, so no one has seen this. You guys are the first. This is the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot if you’re anything like me, but this is an experiment in combining wheels with legs with a very dynamic system that is balancing inside itself all the time and has a lot of knowledge of how to throw its weight around, which it uses to help stabilize itself.
This is much more efficient than a legged robot; it can carry a heavy load on a small footprint and it’s basically an exercise in seeing if we can do something like the humanoid that has less degrees of freedom but eventually could be less expensive and still have significant capability. We call this Handle, because it’s supposed to handle objects eventually.
Boston Dynamics’ founder, Marc Raibert’s description of Handle
Read more at Inverse: Boston Dynamics Releases Video of Its ‘Nightmare-Inducing’ Robot
