YouTube user Hinamitetu has been perfecting this home-designed gymnastics robot and posting the tests online for over two years now. While it’s always impressive to see a little gymnasti-bot with more balance and agility than your puny human body could ever hope to achieve, the latest video in particular should totally blow you away. In it, the robot performs a quadruple backflip, one of the hardest feats in gymnastics which most people could only hope to achieve with a really springy trampoline underneath them. Let’s go ahead and add “acrobats” onto the list of career paths that will no longer be relevant after the robots take over.
To learn more about how the robot works, I asked my friend Caitlin to translate the About page from its original Japanese. As a disclaimer, neither of us are super familiar with the appropriate terminology for robot engineering, so if you’ve got a better translation then let us know in the comments:
“I used 2-axis acceleration sensors. That’s in the head and they primarily measure gravitation. That measurement value changes depending on the angle of revolution. When one sensor is level with ground, that sensor measures zero for gravitation. For the revolution, the positions are divided into four regions. For those boundary locations (up, down, left, right), it detects a signal to stand up or move down. (An up and down sensor circuit with a zero gravitation sensor value as the threshold.) Those signals combined with the pure H,L signals (H,L signal with a zero gravitation sensor value as the threshold) form the trigger. Using these signals as the base, it determines the timing of the bending and straightening the legs.”
At least it’s better than what Google Translate could do, right? One thing’s certain across the language barrier: This little guy is awesome.
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