Scientists have found that, by adopting a special stutter-step hop (think of a layup in basketball), robots could save a considerable amount of energy, as much as ten-fold.
“If we time things right, the robot can jump with a tenth of the power required to jump to the same height under other conditions, in the stutter jumps, we can move the mass at a lower frequency to get off the ground," said Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We achieve the same takeoff velocity as a conventional jump, but it is developed over a longer period of time with much less power.”
The discovery was made after analyzing 20,000 jumps made by a simple robot designed by graduate student Jeffrey Aguilar (see picture below) in a laboratory under a variety of conditions. The study was part of a larger Georgia Tech research project to learn how jumping robots could interact with the environment around them in disaster situations.
Implementing this kind of jump could allow robots to carry out longer missions and cover larger areas. That could be very important in disaster relief situations. However, the stutter jump takes longer to perform, so it might not be ideal in every situation.
To learn more about this study, watch the video above.
Photo courtesy of Georgia Tech.