IHMC Developing New Gymnast-Inspired Humanoid Robot

The robotics group at the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Fla., has an enormous amount of experience with walking robots. They came in second at the DARPA Robotics Challenge with their Running Man Atlas, one of just three teams to score a perfect 8 out of 8, and they've continued to advance bipedal locomotion using both Atlas and NASA's Valkyrie. We write about their research all the time--just a few months ago, they taught Atlas to walk with straight legs, much like a human does. Humans set a very high standard for bipedal mobility. We're well designed for it in both hardware and software, and we can do some absolutely amazing things.