COMAN: the almost-human Humanoid

Todays' robots can walk, interact with objects, jump, they can do all kinds of cool stuff. Yet only a handful can remain standing after a soft push, or any other kind of unexpected interaction. One unexpected little change, and the bot is down. So much for the hundreds of thousands of dollars researchers put in it - the thing can not even stand straight. However, earlier this week, COMAN was introduced into the world of robotics. This little guy will change the way we build robots. Read on and find out why!

COMAN was developed by the Departament of Advanced Robotics and "Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia." The project itself goes by the name of "Compliant Humanoid COMAN." The purpose of the project is to create a robot capable of adjusting to a dynamically changing enviroment (such as shaky soil, unexpected pushes, etc) and be versatile.

streets of New York will be the final test

Humanoid uses an array of sensors (such as gyroscope, accelerometers) to correctly calculate its' position in the area and then correctly react to any changes in its' enviroment.  As of now, the bot can only adjust to small pushes (nothing like what ATLAS or BigDog can do, but those two guys I will talk about later), but it is already very impressive.

version 2.0 is already under development

You can watch the little guy do his thing on this video: