WalkingMachine USArmyTransportationMuseum DSCN7543

A walking vehicle is a vehicle that moves on

leg A leg is a weight-bearing and locomotive anatomical structure, usually having a columnar shape. During locomotion, legs function as "extensible struts". The combination of movements at all joints can be modeled as a single, linear element ca ...

s rather than

wheel A wheel is a circular component that is intended to rotate on an axle bearing. The wheel is one of the key components of the wheel and axle which is one of the six simple machines. Wheels, in conjunction with axles, allow heavy objects to be ...

s or tracks. Walking vehicles have been constructed with anywhere from one to more than eight legs. There are many designs for the

leg mechanism A leg mechanism (walking mechanism) is a mechanical system designed to provide a propulsive force by intermittent frictional contact with the ground. This is in contrast with wheels or continuous tracks which are intended to maintain continuous f ...

s of walking machines that provide foot trajectories with different properties. Walking vehicles are classified according to the number of legs with common configurations being one leg (pogo stick or "hopper"), two legs (

biped Bipedalism is a form of terrestrial locomotion where an organism moves by means of its two rear limbs or legs. An animal or machine that usually moves in a bipedal manner is known as a biped , meaning 'two feet' (from Latin ''bis'' 'double' ...

), four legs (

quadruped Quadrupedalism is a form of locomotion where four limbs are used to bear weight and move around. An animal or machine that usually maintains a four-legged posture and moves using all four limbs is said to be a quadruped (from Latin ''quattuor' ...

), and six legs ( hexapod). There are a few prototypes of walking vehicles. Currently almost all of these are experimental or proof of concept.

Mobility

Walking vehicles can provide greater ground clearance than wheeled or

tracked vehicle Continuous track is a system of vehicle propulsion used in tracked vehicles, running on a continuous band of treads or track plates driven by two or more wheels. The large surface area of the tracks distributes the weight of the vehicle ...

s, but the complexity of their

s has limited their use. Examples of manned walking vehicles include General Electric's Walking truck, the University of Duisburg-Essen's ALDURO.

Timberjack Timberjack is a manufacturer of forestry machinery for both cut-to-length and whole tree logging, and was a subsidiary of John Deere from 2000 to 2006. History Timberjack was founded in Woodstock, Ontario in the 1950s by Wesley Maggill and R ...

, a subsidiary of

John Deere Deere & Company, doing business as John Deere (), is an American corporation that manufactures agricultural machinery, heavy equipment, forestry machinery, diesel engines, drivetrains (axles, transmissions, gearboxes) used in heavy equipment, ...

, built a practical hexapod Walking Forest Machine (harvester). One of the most sophisticated real-world walking vehicles is the Martin Montensano-built 'Walking Beast', a 7-ton quadrapod experimental vehicle suspended by four hydraulic binary-configuration limbs with much greater dexterity.

Examples

Walking dragline excavators

Dragline excavator A dragline excavator is a piece of heavy equipment used in civil engineering and surface mining. Draglines fall into two broad categories: those that are based on standard, lifting cranes, and the heavy units which have to be built on-site. Mo ...

s are extremely large and heavy machines used in mining and civil engineering that have used mechanical "walking" for locomotion since the 1920s. Typically, they use a three-legged gait: each step, a pair of elongated "feet" lift the excavator together with its base and put it back down a short distance forward. Turning is achieved by lifting both "feet" off the ground and pivoting on top of the base in the desired direction.

Big Muskie Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline excavator owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company (formerly a division of American Electric Power), weighing and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1 ...

(1969, 12000 t) was the largest

dragline A dragline excavator is a piece of heavy equipment used in civil engineering and surface mining. Draglines fall into two broad categories: those that are based on standard, lifting cranes, and the heavy units which have to be built on-site. ...

excavator, and thus the largest walking machine ever built. Honda_ASIMO_(ver

Legged robots

The

landers Landers may refer to: People * Landers (surname), a list of people surnamed Landers (including fictional people) Places * Landers, California, United States * Landers Peaks, group of peaks in the northern portion of Alexander Island, Antarct ...

of the Mars 2 and

Mars 3 Mars 3 was a robotic space probe of the Soviet Mars program, launched May 28, 1971, nine days after its twin spacecraft Mars 2. The probes were identical robotic spacecraft launched by Proton-K rockets with a Blok D upper stage, each consist ...

probes carried small tethered " rovers" that were intended to shuffle on the

Martian Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, has appeared as a setting in works of fiction since at least the mid-1600s. It became the most popular celestial object in fiction in the late 1800s as the Moon was evidently lifeless. At the time, the pr ...

surface on a pair of skids, similar to a walking dragline excavator. Both landers failed, so the rovers were never deployed on Mars.

Honda is a Japanese public multinational conglomerate manufacturer of automobiles, motorcycles, and power equipment, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Honda has been the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, reaching a producti ...

has developed a number of

humanoid robot A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other pu ...

s that use a bipedal gait, starting with the experimental E series in the mid-1980s and culminating with the autonomous ASIMO, introduced in 2000. ASIMO has inspired a number of similar bipedal toy robots.

Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Gro ...

develops complex walking robots that are capable of moving over rough terrain and avoiding obstacles. The quadruped

BigDog BigDog is a dynamically stable quadruped military robot that was created in 2005 by Boston Dynamics with Foster-Miller, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Harvard University Concord Field Station. It was funded by DARPA, but the pro ...

was designed for potential military applications. The Dragon of

Furth im Wald Furth im Wald (in Czech ''Brod nad Lesy'', resp. ''Bavorský Brod'') is a town in Bavaria, Germany, near the Czech border in the Bavarian Forest, northeast of Cham, and southwest of Domažlice. The city is known as ''Drachenstadt'' (Dragon C ...

, a quadrupedal

animatronic Animatronics refers to mechatronic puppets. They are a modern variant of the automaton and are often used for the portrayal of characters in films and in theme park attractions. It is a multidisciplinary field integrating puppetry, anatomy a ...

dragon A dragon is a reptilian legendary creature that appears in the folklore of many cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but dragons in western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted a ...

created for a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

festival, was recognized by the

Guinness Book of World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a reference book published annually, listing world ...

as the "World's biggest walking robot". It is operated by remote control rather than a pilot.

Kinetic sculptures

Dutch artist

Theo Jansen Theodorus Gerardus Jozef Jansen (; born 14 March 1948) is a Dutch artist. In 1990, he began building large mechanisms out of PVC that are able to move on their own and, collectively, are titled ''Strandbeest''. The kinetic sculptures appear to ...

has created many walking machines called

strandbeest Theodorus Gerardus Jozef Jansen (; born 14 March 1948) is a Dutch artist. In 1990, he began building large mechanisms out of PVC that are able to move on their own and, collectively, are titled ''Strandbeest''. The kinetic sculptures appear to ...

that wander on Dutch beaches.

Anthropomorphic vehicles

At the end of 2016, Korea Future Technology built a prototype of a robot called METHOD-1, that could qualify as a

mecha In science fiction, or mechs are giant robots or machines controlled by people, typically depicted as humanoid walking vehicles. The term was first used in Japanese after shortening the English loanword or , but the meaning in Japanese is ...

. The robot could walk, and its driver could control the robot's arms individually.

References

{{Reflist 1960s robots Quadruped robots Robots of the United States Walking vehicles