Sandia hoppers leapfrog conventional wisdom about robot mobility

The unique robot, developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories, uses a combustion-driven piston to make leaps as high as 20 feet. The work is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In 1997 DARPA asked Sandia to create a hopping robotic platform for military reconnaissance applications.

The Sandia hopping robot is contained inside a grapefruit-sized plastic shell shaped something like the children's toy Weeble®, so the hopper rights itself after each jump — piston toward the ground but slightly askew. A pre-programmed microprocessor inside the hopper reads an internal compass, and a gimbal mechanism rotates the offset-weighted internal workings so that the hopper rolls around until it is pointed in the desired direction.

Another hopper developed by Sandia for DARPA as an experimental mobile platform jumps 10 to 20 feet in the air and can go about 100 hops on a tank of fuel. Because the hopper is lightweight and could be inexpensive to produce, a variety of worldly uses for hoppers can be forseen.

Press Release and other articles:

http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2000/hoppers.htm