What do you do in a foot of snow or two feet of grass? How do you move them over unstructured terrain elegantly when you know the force sensors are going to fail, they’re not perfect? Vision doesn’t always work.

These quadrupeds only have three motors per leg, twelve motors in all. The minute you put gear reduction in, the only way the robot can ‘feel’ the terrain is through vision or putting sensors in the ‘toes.’ The thing is, those sensors aren’t fast enough. It’s like every other machine, every motorcycle, car - the drivetrain has to have some gear reduction.

The reason we do that is because if a warfighter or a mining company, if anybody is using our robot, this robot had better operate 99.99% of the time. Our robot, when you see it climbing stairs or walking or running around, we turn off all the sensors. We’re adjusting it to make it like a mammal. When our robots move around and you shove them, these forces are computed at 2,000 calculations per second per leg. “We want our robots to feel the environment, transfer it through the motors into our computer platform, and quickly adjust,” Parikh says. Instead, Ghost Robotics tried to imitate dogs or other small mammals by enabling the robot to 'feel' the terrain underfoot rather than relying on sensors alone. The engineers at the firm looked at what was already being developed in terms of quadrupedal robots and thought it was all wrong. Ghost Robotics CEO Jiren Parikh says their robots are incredibly versatile, owing to the stripped-down, nature-inspired approach the company often touts.

Making Robots More Efficient Through Imitating NatureĪside from patrolling the marshes around Tyndall, Ghost Robotics Q-UGVs are being eyed for a wide variety of roles both on and off the battlefield. The Air Force is also eyeing the dog-like robots for use in deployed and/or disaster-ravaged environments, making damaged Tyndall Air Force Base a perfect test environment for the robots, as well as an operational one. The base was damaged heavily in 2018 when hurricane Michael ravaged the coastline, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in destruction to the base. Tyndall sprawls along the Gulf of Mexico in the Florida panhandle in an area prone to hurricanes.

War robot in real life