Festo's New Bionic Robots Include Rolling Spider, Flying Fox

I find Festo&#x27;s work interesting, but the spider bot in particular looks really clunky overall in comparison to even some of the hobby level stuff that&#x27;s out there. It would make sense to have a rolling robot if it was really fast (and could steer while rolling).<p>Here&#x27;s an example of a hexapod from 6 years ago, I believe built from a kit but running customized motion control code:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rAeQn5QnyXo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rAeQn5QnyXo</a><p>Skip to 0:45 to see it running. Still amazing to me and I haven&#x27;t seen too many other legged robots that look this smooth.

If you&#x27;re into robots, festo makes some of the coolest. Here was a previous one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OxVf9QY_TFs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OxVf9QY_TFs</a>

I love these guys! The Festo robotics group was one of the sponsors for our Battlebot back in the early naughts and unlike the other sponsors who were only concerned with how their logo would look on TV the Festo folks really got into the technical aspects of our designs. They went so far as to modify one of their pan head cylinder designs so that it would fit under the &#x27;wedge&#x27; of our robot and allow us to throw another robot out of the ring. Sadly Battlebots had died before we really had a chance to try something like that out.<p>I particularly like the gait work they have done with the rolling spider robot. Legged robots are good for really rough terrain and crap for efficiently going long distances. It is a good compromise.

there was this toy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;paulgtoys&#x2F;pterodactyl-5-rc-flying-lizard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;paulgtoys&#x2F;pterodactyl-5...</a><p>quite similar to this flying fox.

Festo is absolutely fascinating. Their air penguin blew my mind.

It&#x27;s great given to where we are right now on a technological level, but until we get decent artificial muscles, all biomemetic robots will look like a spastic person having uncontrolled convulsions.