Wow, it's taken us so long to get (something like) this thing going. 37 years now, and Boston Dynamics is only now in the final steps of productizing v1.
Boston Dynamics' CEO, Marc Raibert, was a professor at CMU at the same time, and Marc and Ivan are good pals. Little-known fact: Ivan convinced Marc to start doing work in legged locomotion! So, in a way, Ivan is responsible for modern legged locomotion by 'seeding' the field with a genius like Marc Raibert! Here's some of what was going on at CMU at the same time as Ivan's Walker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG_ZKXo6Rlg
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Wow, it's taken us so long to get (something like) this thing going. 37 years now, and Boston Dynamics is only now in the final steps of productizing v1.
Boston Dynamics' CEO, Marc Raibert, was a professor at CMU at the same time, and Marc and Ivan are good pals. Little-known fact: Ivan convinced Marc to start doing work in legged locomotion! So, in a way, Ivan is responsible for modern legged locomotion by 'seeding' the field with a genius like Marc Raibert! Here's some of what was going on at CMU at the same time as Ivan's Walker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG_ZKXo6Rlg
This video was extremely cool. Thanks for sharing! Legged robots are so endearing.
Glad you liked it. Boston Dynamics is an overnight success only 40-ish years in the making... !
See also this Scientific American article of theirs https://www.academia.edu/28215739/Machines_That_Walk
The Timberjack walking tree harvester was mostly ready for commercialization.
Got a link?
This was their promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftV2HeKPeBM
Timberjack was bought by John Deere in 2000, and the subsidiary discontinued in '06.
That looked neat.. but also impractical. Way too slow.
It's interesting that it came from Finland.