Up until now, robots are capable of walking, jogging and some even in doing somersaults, but a team has now created a new robot that is able to skate and even play ice hockey.
A professor at ETH Zurich, Stelian Coros, and his team has created a new quadruped robot, which he named as ‘Skaterbot’. As the name entails, the robot has the ability to skate and also play ice hockey with its human players.
Coros made the bot first learn how skates behave on ice, and then it learned its own skating technique by itself. He told BBC Click, “The only thing we tell it is how one ice skate behaves on ice. In particular, the fact that it’s free to move in the direction of the blade, and it has high-friction forces in a direction that’s orthogonal [at a right angle] to it.”
Coros continued, “After this, the robot figure our entirely on its own how to move on ice.”
Futurism reported, the team foresees Skatebot to be useful during search and rescue missions, and could also be used for deliveries. Coros told ETH Zurich, “Considering that these are our first baby steps on ice, I think that our robot did quite well.”
“I envision a moment in the not-too-distant future where it will be as easy to create robots as it is to currently make structures out of LEGO blocks, for example,” Coros concluded.