Last time we saw UC Berkeley's Salto-1P, the robot was bouncing all over the place, able to hop continuously without any trouble. It was impressive to watch, especially when it occasionally exploded itself. But of course the Berkeley researchers had long-term plans to take the robot from generally bouncy to bouncy with a level of control that would allow them to teach it some sophisticated tricks. We saw some of those tricks this week at IROS 2018 in Spain, where Justin Yim presented a new video of Salto-1P turning some office furniture into a bouncy house. Salto-1P's hardware is the same as last year.

Last December, Duncan Haldane (whose research on incredibly agile bioinspired robots we've featured extensively in the past) ended up on the cover of the inaugural issue of Science Robotics with his jumping robot, Salto. Salto had impressive vertical jumping agility, and was able to jump from the ground onto a vertical surface, and then use that surface to change its direction with a second jump. It was very cool to watch, but the jumping was open-loop and planar, meaning that two jumps in a row was just about all that Salto could manage. Haldane mentioned to us in December that future work on Salto could include chaining together multiple jumps, and in a paper just accepted to the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), he and co-author Justin Yim at UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, led by Professor Ronald Fearing, show the improvements that they've made over the last six months. Thanks to some mechanical fine-tuning and the clever addition of a pair of thrusters, the new Salto-1P is jumping longer, faster, and higher than ever.