Recently, the Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center of Zhejiang University (hereinafter referred to as the Science and Technology Innovation Center) Humanoid Robot Innovation Research Institute, together with Mirror Technology Co., Ltd. and Hangzhou Kaidal Welding Robot Co., Ltd., launched the world's fastest quadruped robot "Black Panther", which can run stably at a speed of more than 10 meters per second.
How hard is it to run 10 meters in a second? This speed is close to the limit of human movement, which is only possible for a few top athletes, and this speed is not only the limit of human beings, but also very difficult for robots, which have very high requirements for the ground and electricity.
The "Panther" weighs 38 kg overall and stands at a height of 0.63 meters. In tests, it was able to consistently run speeds of more than 10 m/s, which broke the world record for a quadruped robot and was close to the fastest running speed of a 100-meter sprinter.
As an important research topic of the Humanoid Robot Innovation Research Institute of Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center of Zhejiang University, the quadruped robot "Black Panther" has been developed since 2018 and lasted for 6 years.
How was Black Panther born?
The R&D team takes dynamics as the fulcrum, leverages every inch of the robot's bone design, and at the same time deeply "Taoism is natural", learns the characteristics of natural animals such as black panther and jerboa in hip joints, knee joints, soles of feet and other movement configurations, and improves the strength, toughness, strength, limit, accuracy, density, and fluency of the black panther in the process of high-speed movement, realizing the coexistence of small body and large energy.
In early experiments, when the "Black Panther" was measured, the top speed was fixed at 6 m/s. Once this speed is exceeded, its calves will snap and its entire torso will disintegrate.
Behind the "fast" of Black Panther 2.0 is the team's breakthrough research on robot dynamics. They made full use of the Huygens coupling pendulum principle to make its four legs coordinate into a unified gait to form a joint force to achieve high-speed sprints; Secondly, in order to further reduce the ground force at the moment of the impact of the robot during high-speed running, and reduce the energy consumption of the movement, they cleverly used the spring installed in the knee joint of the Panther 2.0 as a buffer; in order to further break the curse that the panther will inevitably break when the calf is running at 6m/s, they have developed the "jerboa carbon fiber calf", which achieves a 135% increase in stiffness at the cost of only 16% increase in weight; Finally, they also imitated the sharp claws of the cheetah and customized a special "running shoe" for the Panther 2.0, which improved its grip performance by 200%, so that the panther could make every step as fast as lightning but as steady as Mount Tai.