Part of the reason for the long hiatus from posting is that I’ve been supremely busy with a few things. One of them is that I’ve cofounded a robotics company!

Check out the simple but snazzy new website: http://www.ghostrobotics.io

You’re probably wondering what the name is about. One of the main things that sets our actuators apart is that they are transparent. No, that doesn’t mean that you can see through them, but rather that the motors can feel forces applied on them by the world. This is important, for things like reacting to perturbations, like when the robot leg touches the ground (demo of that in the gif below), or for safety if the motors are running near humans. And, well, ghosts are transparent?

Minitaur

The robot that I’ve spent most of my time working on since last summer is called Minitaur. We’ve written one journal paper about its design and the open-access preprint is now up.

I haven’t managed to write the papers about the gait work I’ve been doing on it, so it’s sort of still under wraps, but at least I can now share this silly gif:

In case you were wondering, it does go forward and doesn’t just dither in place… Hopefully I can share many more exciting videos with Minitaur in the near future!