I, For One, Welcome Our Sphere-Shaped Quadrupedal Robot Overlords

If you’ve ever wondered what you’ll eventually find inside your body cavity when the robots take over, meet QRoSS by Takeshi Aoki, Satoshi Ito, and Yosuke Sei from the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. This robot consists of a rounded roll cage and four legs hidden inside its body. You can throw the ball into a room where it can roll around and then, when it needs to move around more deliberately, it can pull out its four legs and get down to work.

When it tips over the legs can right it back up and it can also roll itself around its environment using weights. In short it’s like a primitive version of the Droideka without the guns or the force field.

The team showed the robot at IROS 2015 in Germany and their paper, “Development of Quadruped Walking Robot with Spherical Shell – Mechanical Design for Rotational Locomotion” is available now. It’s a clever solution to a thorny problem and is also amazingly cool.