Boston Dynamics Equips Atlas Humanoid Robot with Wheels for Lateral Sprinting and Aerial Rotations

IT Home November 10 news, Boston Dynamics released a video yesterday, showcasing the Atlas humanoid robot equipped with wheels; now engineers are testing this robot's continuous high-speed movement and heavy-load performance.

Boston Dynamics engineers stated that they installed standard electric scooter wheels onto the Atlas robot's ankle joint actuators through custom adapters. The entire process did not involve very significant hardware changes, and engineers did not rebuild the robot's software model from scratch, but simply replaced the original feet with wheels in a simulation environment.

From the official demonstration video, the wheel-equipped Atlas can jump up and spin around and perform lateral sprints. This modification also allows engineers to test the robot's performance Every acceleration, turn, and stop of Atlas will continuously apply a load to the actuators.

Additionally, some of Atlas's movements originate from human motion capture recordings. Engineers specifically selected some foot-sliding movements to study whether wheels could achieve similar effects. In lateral sprints, Atlas no longer drags its feet across the ground, but has learned to control the wheel steering to move laterally in a rolling manner.

Atlas also through a trajectory tracking controller, successfully jumped up and turned once.The system follows the recorded human motion data and completed the action on the first attempt.

IT Home noted that this wheeled humanoid robot is not a commercial product; Boston Dynamics chose to use it as a research platform.