Robot unravels mystery of walking

Roboticists are using the lessons of a 1930s human physiologist to build the world's fastest walking robot.Runbot is a self-learning, dynamic robot, which has been built around the theories of Nikolai Bernstein."Getting a robot to walk like a human requires a dynamic machine," said Professor Florentin Woergoetter.Runbot is a small, biped robot which can move at speeds of more than three leg lengths per second, slightly slower than the fastest walking human.Bernstein said that animal movement was not under the total control of the brain but rather, "local circuits" did most of the command and control work.The brain was involved in the process of walking, he said, only when the understood parameters were altered, such as moving from one type of terrain to another, or dealing with uneven surfaces.The basic walking steps of Runbot, which has been built by scientists co-operating across Europe, are controlled by reflex information received by peripheral sensors on the joints and feet of the robot, as well as an accelerometer which monitors the pitch of the machine. These sensors pass data on to local neural loops-the equivalent of local circuits-which analyse the information and make adjustments to the gait of the robot in real time.
To read more go to:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6291746.stm
As in the days of Noah....