Centauro: A New Disaster Response Robot from IIT

One of the things that we learned from the DARPA Robotics Challenge is that it's useful for robots to have legs to walk, but it's even more useful for robots to be versatile and adaptable, with multimodal locomotion capabilities that they can deploy depending on the situation. At the DRC, we saw all kinds of different designs, but one of the more unique approaches came from the University of Bonn, in Germany, with their robot Momaro. Momaro used a "centaur" design, with four legs that had wheels on the bottom (like a wheeled quadruped) coupled to a humanoid upper torso with a head and arms. It was the top-ranked European robot in the DRC, completing an almost perfect run in just 34 minutes. We've since been wondering whether the centaur design would inspire other disaster robots, and now we know the answer is yes.