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A Russian team of inventors and robot fanatics called Konstantin Ivanov have built a large, walking, robotic ostrich mostly out of wood and at a cost of only $1,500.
As Gizmag reports, “Its construction and the way it walks suggests it slides an internal weight over the supporting leg to keep its balance, a technique implemented in some of the first walking robots developed in Japan in the early 1970s.
The ostrich robot may not be the most technologically advanced biped robot, but it was made on a budget to prove Konstantin Ivanov can keep their costs to a minimum.”
Other than the fact that they built a wooden, walking ostrich that resembles a cartoon version of the animal, one of the coolest aspects of this project is that it is equipped with a saddle for carrying people around. In the video below, one of the inventors shows off the Jurassic Ostrich Robot, as it’s being called, taking a life-sized human dummy for a ride on a Russian TV show.
This isn’t the last walking robot we’ll see from Konstantin Ivanov, a team that includes an aviation technician and an electronics engineer, but no one with any academic training in robotics. The ambitious group hopes to build a robotic saddle horse capable of traveling at 43.3 mph.
To put that into context, that’s 14 mph faster than the land speed record for a robot set by Boston Dynamics’ robotic cheetah (28.3 mph), which is a bit faster than Usain Bolt’s world record of 27.78 mph. Good luck guys, we seriously hope you accomplish this goal.
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