Author: James Vincent
Google’s parent company Alphabet continues to scale back its robot ambitions, shutting down Schaft, a little-known Japanese robotics team it purchased in 2013.
Schaft was best known for its work developing advanced bipedal robotics. The firm had its origins in the University of Tokyo’s robotics lab, where engineers built bio-inspired robot legs with metal bones, muscles, and tendons. The team later moved to more conventional systems, modifying industrial robotics hardware to be more powerful and precise.
In 2013, the lab spin-off, Schaft, competed in (and won) DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, which tests robots’ ability to navigate disaster scenarios. The team claimed that their custom actuators (basically a robot’s muscles) were ten times...
Continue reading…
Continue reading...
Google’s parent company Alphabet continues to scale back its robot ambitions, shutting down Schaft, a little-known Japanese robotics team it purchased in 2013.
Schaft was best known for its work developing advanced bipedal robotics. The firm had its origins in the University of Tokyo’s robotics lab, where engineers built bio-inspired robot legs with metal bones, muscles, and tendons. The team later moved to more conventional systems, modifying industrial robotics hardware to be more powerful and precise.
In 2013, the lab spin-off, Schaft, competed in (and won) DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, which tests robots’ ability to navigate disaster scenarios. The team claimed that their custom actuators (basically a robot’s muscles) were ten times...
Continue reading…
Continue reading...