A German company that designed an eerily realistic robotic seagull a few years ago has unveiled its latest offering: a "BionicKangaroo" that can hop like the live animal.
Headquartered in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany, Festo is a bio-engineering and automatic company whose scientists have developed a robotic kangaroo that mimics the way real kangaroos use kinetic energy to move from one jump to the next, The Telegraph reported.
Real kangaroos are able to recover energy from one hop to keep hopping without growing tired, and BionicKangaroo is able to use similar principles to continue jumping, presumably for an unlimited amount of time.
"With the BionicKangaroo we have precisely reproduced the most characteristic features of natural kangaroos: recuperating and storing energy, and then releasing it once more in the next bound," said Festo's Heinrich Frontzek, as quoted by The Telegraph.
The robotic kangaroo weighs roughly 15 pounds and is a little more than 3 feet tall. It can jump more than a foot vertically and almost 32 inches horizontally, pneumatically propelled through a small battery that drives high pressure air to its "muscles."
An elastic spring emulates a real kangaroo's tendons, according to IEEE Spectrum.
In 2011, Festo launched a robotic seagull called "SmartBird," which can take off, fly and land on its own.
The company will showcase its latest robotic effort in BionicKangaroo's official debut next week at the Hannover Messe event.
The German developer has said it doesn't plan to mass-produce robotic kangaroos; instead, the company will use the device to show more effective ways to recover energy from movement, The Telegraph reported.
Or perhaps Google will buy it.
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