Over the past decade, we have witnessed a variety of bouncing robots. With a few exceptions, these robots hope to find inspiration in biology for design and function. Because nature is full of incredible bouncing animals, it seems like a reasonable pursuit to put their capabilities on robots—robots that have tried to mimic the actions of creatures like ants, frogs, birds, and baby monkeys, occasionally in some a certain way to succeed. The few exceptions that have not used this bionic approach include using compressed gas or even explosives to make robots jump in ways animals can’t. The impressive performance of these robots is at least in part due to the fact that their jumping techniques are not fully integrated into biological models that tend to suffer from non-jumping factors such as versatility. For a team of roboticists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Disney Research, this begs a simple question: If you want to build a robot that’s just about jumping as high as possible, it can jump How tall? In a paper published in the journal Nature, they gave the answer using a robot that can jump to a height of 33 meters , reaching the height of the Statue of Liberty’s eyeball.
The bouncing robot is 30 centimeters high and weighs 30 grams, which is still relatively heavy for this type of robot. It’s made almost entirely of carbon fiber bows that act as springs and rubber bands that store energy when tensioned. The central part of the robot is equipped with a motor, some batteries, and a latching mechanism, which is attached to a rope that connects the top and bottom of the robot. To prepare for the jump, the robot turns on a motor that spins, and over the course of two minutes, the motor tightens the rope to flatten the robot and gradually stores energy to an absurd level. When the rope is fully tightened, the motor gives a pull to let the latching mechanism release the rope, releasing all the energy in about 9 milliseconds, during which time the robot accelerates from zero to 28 m/s. All in all, the robot has more than 1000 J/kg of energy, which is an order of magnitude higher than even the best bouncing creatures, and easily beats other bouncing robots by five times.
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