Researchers from the School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo and the Intelligent Systems Research Institute (AIST) in Japan are working on a new prototype bipedal jumping robot. The robot nicknamed Mowgli (likely a tribute to the well known book character) utilizes an artificial musculoskeletal system with pneumatic muscles to perform explosive motion jumping as high as 50% the robot’s height and landing smoothly. The musculoskeletal system is inspired by biological systems; as the team explains in a recent paper, animals which are good at jumping and running have tapered legs with a small foot mass and moment of inertia.

Mowgli stands less than 1 meter tall (0.9 meters to be exact) and weighs just 3Kgrs. As mentioned earlier, the robot is bipedal with 6 pneumatic muscles on each leg for 6 degrees-of-freedom. The robot is controlled by an off-board PC running a real-time Operating System (OS) while the compressed air for the muscles and electrical power are also supplied by off-board systems. The team has demonstrated the robustness of their robot performing experiments in simulation and with the real robot humping on the ground and onto a chair. In fact, here is the video of Mowgli jumping from the ground and landing on top of a computer chair without human intervention,


Video is copyright the School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo, and the Intelligent Systems Research Institute, Japan.