The Chinese company Unitree Robotics has equipped its four-legged robot with a robotic arm. It can lift up to five kilograms of cargo and helps the robot interact with the environment, for example, open doors.
One of the first practical applications that were offered for four-legged robots was cargo transportation. In particular, in this way, the US military wanted to use BigDog from Boston Dynamics, but after the tests they refused from this idea, because the robot had several serious drawbacks and did not compensate for them with its advantages. In the following years, the manufacturing companies of such robots mainly offer to use them for patrolling, especially in factories, warehouses and other similar premises. But the environment in them was designed for the needs and capabilities of people, so it is difficult for them to move around in it, and hardware capabilities, as a rule, do not allow them to perform any active actions.
Boston Dynamics developed a robotic manipulator for this task and began selling it at the beginning of the year, and now Unitree Robotics has introduced its analogue. The robot arm consists of four segments and has six degrees of freedom. With one side it is attached to the back of the robot, and on the other there is a simple grip that can be compressed and unclenched. At the same time, it can potentially be replaced with another grip, for example, with suction cups. The manipulator is able to detect collisions, so it can also be used near people.
The developers note that the accuracy of the hand is about 0.1 millimeters. It will be available in two versions, which will differ in carrying capacity: up to two or up to five kilograms. The cost of the younger version of the manipulator is about $ 6,600, the cost of the older one is unknown.
Unitree Robotics showed different use cases: from serious ones, for example, for opening a door by a robot or a separate job of carrying loads, to funny ones - engineers gave the robot a toy lightsaber and programmed the robot to fight with a person with it.
Four-legged robots are offered to be equipped with a variety of payloads. Recently, Ghost Robotics and S.W.O.R.D. Defense showed a four-legged robot with a sniper rifle and a thermal imager.
Grigory Kopiev
