A team of roboticists and AI specialists at the Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Lab in Korea has designed, built and successfully tested a four-legged robot that is capable of conducting high-speed parkour maneuvers. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how they gave their robot a controller capable of both planning and tracking its own movements to allow it to freely traverse a range of environments.

Parkour is an obstacle course type athletic discipline that takes place in unpredictable, real-world, generally urban environments —it involves climbing walls, jumping between buildings, maneuvering around objects and running across difficult, uneven terrain. The objective is to get from one place to another without injury. To give their robot the ability to conduct parkour maneuvers, the team made one change right away—they gave it four legs.

The next thing they did was design and build a special kind of controller, one that was capable of planning the route to be taken and a tracker that told the robot where to place its feet and how to use its body to move forward safely.

A small team of roboticists at Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, has designed, built and tested a four-legged robot capable of playing badminton with human players.

In their study, published in the journal Science Robotics, the group used a reinforcement learning-based controller to give the robot the ability to track, predict and respond to the movement of a shuttlecock in play, demonstrating the feasibility of using multi-legged robots in dynamic sports scenarios.

Badminton is a sport similar to tennis, the main difference being the use of a shuttlecock rather than a tennis ball. The goal is the same: to hit the shuttlecock over a net placed midcourt to an awaiting opponent.

While there are many potential uses for soft-bodied robots, the things are still typically only built in small experimental batches. Scottish scientists are out to change that, with a mass-production-capable soft bot that is 3D-printed in a single piece which then walks off of the print bed.

Before we go any further, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a soft robot that was printed in one piece.

It was just this March that we told you about a hexapod bot created at UC San Diego, which was 3D-printed in one continuous 58-hour step. That robot was powered not by a motor but by compressed air, which sequentially moves its legs forward.