We all do crave for speed, don’t we? The need for speed lives in all of us and every now and then we find it hard to suppress this urge. Is it true for robots as well? Your natural response would be that robots, as of now, are quite slow and are not like the ones we see in movies or read about in science fiction novels. However, this is where we introduce the star of this post; OutRunner. The robot comes from the spinoff of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, known as Robotics Unlimited, and being headed by Sebastien Cotton who is a research scientist.
According to Cotton; ‘The whole robotic world is really closed off right now…If you’re not an engineer with a Ph.D., well, you won’t be able to play with robots. I want to change that, so I started my company to commercialize robots.’ OutRunner is one of the many robots that Robotics Unlimited plans to produce. This particular robot, however, is quite a speedster, capable of achieving speeds of 20 miles per hour with about 2 hours worth battery time. The company is calling it the marathon running lightning bolt! Although the top speed is less but it still stands as the fastest robot these days and runs just like humans and many animals do; antagonistically.
Moving on to the specifications; the OutRunner has a height of 2 feet and weighs in at about 3 pounds with a total of 6 legs with three legs located on either side of the motor located centrally. The robot also has its own processing unit. It has been designed so that it is capable of running on grass, dirt, asphalt and more or less any other such surface. The robot is self-balancing and also allows for control from a smartphone.
An HD camera has been incorporated which streams in real time what the robot is seeing and you can enjoy this experience for $799 or for $299 if you would settle for a top speed of 10 Mph – OutRunner ‘Core’.
The company is quite hopeful that it will be able to finalize the design and smartphone app in 2014 and will start the shipping of models to Kickstarter backers by the end of this year.
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