Robotic turkeys need not worry about ending up on someone's Thanksgiving table. There is not much meat on those legs and the bird is just a bit tough to chew. I found this old article on a robotic turkey when I did a search for a Thanksgiving topic for RobotNext. So, in keeping with my on-going fascination about robots based on biology, this seemed like the perfect post. The robot is called the Spring Turkey and it was the first walking robot developed at the MIT Leg Lab. Check out the excerpt from the article from MIT. Then follow the link for more information.
Photo Credit: MIT Leg Laboratory
"Researchers at MIT's Leg Laboratory have built a series of legged robots… The first walking robot was Spring Turkey, which could only walk in circles attached to the end of a mechanical boom… Spring Turkey is a planar bipedal walking robot, designed and built by Peter Dilworth and Jerry Pratt. The robot was developed as an experimental platform for implementing force control actuation techniques, motion description and control techniques, and various walking algorithms."
For more information on Spring Turk go to the MIT Leg Lab.
via web.mit.edu
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