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DAY BY DAY, human beings grow more and more inadequate. Robots steal our jobs. They can burn us in a foot race. And they can even read our damn minds.
Salto’s developer, roboticist Duncan Haldane, took inspiration from the bushbaby, a generally frenetic animal with a vertical leap of six feet. That’s thanks in part to its “supercrouch” posture. “The basic idea is that these jumping animals are just better at crouching,” says Haldane. “They have a better crouched posture, which lets their muscles store a lot of energy in their tendons and then release it later to power really, really high jumps.” (Salto’s tendon is in fact a spring.)
Obviously Salto departs from the bushbaby in that Haldane got rid of a number of limbs. Why? Well, because he could. "Salto has one leg right now because we wanted to see how far you could push a robot with one leg," says Haldane. "Even if you have one leg we've shown that you can move in three dimensions." Evolution methodically shaped the bushbaby over millions of years, but that doesn't mean you have to design a perfect mimic to harness the animal's powers.
Now, the cool thing here isn't that Salto pulls the record for robotic leaps with its four-foot jump—other robots can jump higher—but that it can jump at a wall, then pull off a second jump. It’s doing parkour, only Salto doesn’t fall on its face. Which means that as Haldane perfects the controls, one day he'll get the robot to string together many more jumps and better avoid obstacles to travel significant distances.
To what end? Well, search and rescue for one. After all, rubble is no place for a wheeled robot. “We've taken a small robot that weighs less than a stick of butter and given it so much mobility that it can move around human-scale environments,” says Haldane. “So we can go up curbs, we can go up stairs, if you want to have a robot jump up and get on the table with you.”
