am i the only one who gets annoyed by every "body-length : speed" and "body-weight : carrying-capacity" comparison? these things don't scale, people! it's not amazing.
is it amazing that a spider can freefall from 10,000 ft (millions of body lengths) and survive? no, it isn't.
2.2 meters per second isn't bad for something that tiny. Put a little bomb payload on there and you've got yourself a nice targeted killing machine that'll get the target well before anyone notices. Question is, how much weight (battery, camera, bomb) can it carry before it slows down to be too slow to be useful?
Spiders are great, but we can't make them do things for us like this thing can.
It's not relative to absolute size -- it's relative to the average size of the thing. Baby elephants are cute, even if full-grown dogs, being much smaller, aren't.
A tarantula is not so much a small thing as it is a HUGE spider. Tiny spiders are actually cute. At least, as cute as spiders get, anyway.
"What makes the robot wicked fast is the fact that it's got four independent drive motors, each one of which has a power to weight ratio that's absolutely bananas. Only 6 millimeters in size each, the motors output 1.5 watts of power at 40,000 RPM, driving the individual whegs through 16:1 planetary gearheads. They're not cheap (hundreds of dollars each), but they make for one crazy little robot. And of course, independently driven whegs make the robot smaller, lighter, simpler to steer, and generally more efficient overall"
What are my current alternatives if I want to build something similar and I'm only willing to spend say $50 per drive motor?
Install off road RC car paddle wheels on this thing and it will perform the same or better. It might even float! "Four leg robot fastest on water." Right.
I am disgusted by this. University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins ought to be ashamed. It's an insult to anyone working on real legged locomotion. Dishonest at the very least. And, if the research is funded with public money tagged for legged locomotion this is fraudulent as well. Sad.
