This Walking Robot Pulls a Three-Ton Airplane

The quadruped robot called HyQReal has been designed to be powerful.
Loukia Papadopoulos

This quadruped robot called HyQReal is the result of a cooperation from the Dynamic Legged Systems Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). It's 1.33 m long and 90 cm tall, and its weight is 130kg

It has been designed to be big and powerful. To demonstrate this fact, IIT decided to see if it could pull a three-ton airplane and yes, it turns out it can.

But HyQReal has many capabilities that are not showcased in this video. For starters, it's both water and dust proof since its actuators are mostly sealed up.

It can autonomously recover after it falls and its battery lasts a good two hours. It is protected by an aluminum roll cage and a skin made of Kevlar, glass fiber and plastic.

It also has rubber feet for traction which may have helped it when it was pulling that plane. Finally, it has two computers on board; one for vision and one for control.

According to its webpage, the robot has been developed to tackle "disaster response and other tasks in dangerous and dirty environments" that "can put human operators at risk."

Its designers plan to put an electric arm on it because we weren't already impressed with what it already does. Watch the video and be impressed yourselves.

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