Engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Technische Universitat Munchen may have achieved a major step in that direction with their “spring-mass” implementation of human and animal walking dynamics, allowing robots to maintain balance and efficiency of motion in difficult environments.
Studies done with OSU’s ATRIAS robot model, which incorporates the spring-mass theory, show that it’s three times more energy-efficient than any other human-sized bipedal robots.
