Engineers at The University of Manchester have unlocked the secrets to designing a robot capable of jumping 200 metres – higher than any other jumping robot designed to date.
Using a combination of mathematics, computer simulations, and laboratory experiments, the researchers have discovered how to design a robot with the optimum size, shape and the arrangement of its parts, allowing it to jump high enough to clear obstacles many times its own size.
The current highest-jumping robot can reach up to 33 metres, which is equivalent to 110 times its own size. Now, researchers have found out how to design a robot that could jump over 120 metres in the air (or 200 metres on the moon) – that’s more than twice the height of Big Ben’s tower.
The advancement, published in the journal Mechanism and Machine Theory, will revolutionise applications ranging from planetary exploration to disaster rescue to surveillance of hazardous or inaccessible spaces.
Co-author Dr John Lo, Research Associate in Space Robotics at The University of Manchester, said: “Robots are traditionally designed to move by rolling on wheels or using legs to walk, but jumping provides an effective way of travelling around locations where the terrain is very uneven, or where there are a lot of obstacles, such as inside caves, through forests, over boulders, or even the surface of other planets in space.
“While jumping robots already exist, there are several big challenges in the design of these jumping machines, the main one being to jump high enough to overcome large and complicated obstacles. Our design would dramatically improve the energy efficiency and performance of spring-driven jumping robots.”