South Korean Cheetaroid Wants to Join the Cat Robot Race

Four-legged robots are multiplying in labs around the world, and a number of projects are drawing inspiration from one particular family of animals: big cats. This new breed includes Boston Dynamics’s Cheetah, MIT’s Cheetah Robot, Osaka University’s Pneupard, and EPFL’s CheetahCub. The latest specimen comes from South Korea and is called Cheetaroid.

Now, you may be asking why we need quadruped robots and, in particular, cat-inspired ones. The creators of the Cheetaroid, a team from Sogang University’s Robotic Systems Control Laboratory, led by Professor Kyoungchul Kong, are envisioning different applications. They illustrate those in the image below, which shows how Cheetaroid could be used to assist firefighters, soldiers, disabled individuals, and—well, we’re not exactly sure what’s going on in the lower right image but we wouldn’t want to be the guy in the bite suit. [Read More]