Although humans are great athletes, robots have shown that they aren’t bad either. A new robot ‘Stickman’ has shown some great acrobatic skills by performing an incredible backflip and other stunts.
Apart from making movies, Disney Research has apparently created one human-scale robot that it calls ‘Stickman’ and it is literally a robotic stick that can do aerial acrobatics such as backflips.
As explained by The Verge, while doing the backflip, Stickman swings from a ceiling-mounted wire that was 19.6ft above ground. It then tucks into a ball at peak height and performs the backflip before eventually landing onto a mat. Apart from performing a backflip, the robot also performed an amazing double backflip and a freefall landing.
Watch this robot doing a spectacular back flip
When stretched out at its full length, the headless Stickman is seven-feet-tall. Disney Research paper describes it as ‘to approximate the height of a human stunt performer with arms raised over his or her head’.
Some techniques including inertial motion sensing, computer vision, and a trio of laser rangefinders, leading, center, and trailing, made it possible for the robot to perform the stunt. The rangefinders helped Stickman determine how close or far away the ground is as it falls.
Though the robot still does not have proper legs, its practical usage can be a bit far off. However, as per Business Insider – India, in future the robot can be used for many purposes including rescue operations and for entertainment.
Stickman is not the first robot to perform a backflip. Last year, the humanoid robot, Atlas, by Boston Dynamics also performed a successful backflip.