This Ostrich-Like Robot Can Lift And Place Boxes With Uncanny Grace

Boston Dynamics has had quite a lot of success with its previous projects on humanoid and robots resembling animals. They can perform some simple human acts like running and even more complicated acrobatic moves.

Recently, the company came up with another design for a model that looks like a bird. In a video from the Waltham, we can see that the robot can heap boxes perfectly. It moves by the pair of wheels underneath, gets hold of a box, raises it, and puts it down precisely at the needed place.

It navigates its ways with the help of machine vision and can lift objects weighing a maximum of 33 pounds, the video’s caption reveals. In that demo, the robot works with 11-pound boxes.

This bird-like model is built on the base of “Handle,” which is a testing robot featured in another video also from Boston Dynamics released in 2017. In the original prototype, there are wheels and appendage resembling arms on the machine. In this newer robot, there is some kind of a neck connected to a grabbing mechanism, which looks like a trunk of an elephant or a snout of a tapir.

This bird-like model is built on the base of “Handle"

According to a Howie Choset, Associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, there was a massive demand for this kind of machines in the logistics field at the moment. He said that Boston Dynamics' bird-like robot is proof that machines can lift heavy objects with just a lightweight base.

Kate Darling highly regarded the design of this model and said that she was impressed by how well the robot stays balanced, its excellent machine vision, which helps it find its ways around its surroundings, and its ostrich-like appearance. However, she doubted the practical application of the robot as it costs too much to be used in a regular warehouse.