Story by
Courtney Boyd Myers
Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups gr Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups grow internationally. Previously, she was the Features Editor and East Coast Editor of TNW covering New York City startups and digital innovation. She loves magnets + reading on a Kindle. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter @CBM and Google +.
Meet Athlete, a robot with a pair of prosthetic blades and fourteen artificial, pneumatic-powered muscles.
IEEE Spectrum’s Erico Guizzo first wrote about this brilliant bipedal humanoid that may one day outrun us all. The bot is the pet project of Japanese researcher Ryuma Niiyama, who is currently working on his post-doctorate at MIT. According to Guizzo, each leg has seven sets of artificial muscles, each with one to six pneumatic actuators that correspond to muscles in the human body such as the gluteus maximus, adductor and hamstring. Currently, Niiyama and his team are trying to get Athlete to run farther than three steps (at 1.2 meters/sec) before collapsing, which is its current best effort.
Robots gotta…
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