The world’s first manned robot took its first formative (and no doubt very loud) steps in South Korea last week — but you may be surprised to hear that Ubuntu was there to assist it.
Standing an impressive 13 feet high, the bipedal Method-2 robot is referred to “robot-powered suit” that responds and mimics the actions of the person sat inside the cockpit, Ripley Power Loader style!
The machine, which is able to walk like a human, has to haul a huge 130kg arms in each lunge forward, and weighs 1.5 ton in total.
From a short video posted by Ruptly TV, Ubuntu is involved in helping engineers monitor, debug, and process the robot as it stomps forward.
While there’s no suggestion that the robot itself runs on Ubuntu or Linux (something that is not improbable) it’s nonetheless great to see open-source software (especially of the flavor we write about) being used in advancements in robotics and engineering.
Around 30 engineers are said to have on the mechanical marvel, the design of which is, in part, inspired by films like Terminator says its (famous) designer Vitaly Bulgarov.
R&D spending on the creation has thus far hit $200 million, and news reports say the Method-2 could go on sale by the end of 2017 — with an equally giant price tag of $8.3 million!
For more details on the robot, including a glimpse at some truly epic sci-fi-esque photos of the machine in action, see this blog post over on Design Boom.
And if you’re lucky enough to get to try one, please don’t run sudo snap install skynet on it!
H/t Olcay