Engineers have developed a robot that mimics the natural gait of a human being.
The machine called Amber 2 has been developed by the engineering team at Texas A&M University's Amber robotics labs.
The robot is basically a pair of legs and feet attached to an overhead boom, but it appears to come closer to walking like a person than any other robot currently available.
Humans are able to walk so smoothly because of the seamless interaction between the muscles, bone, ligaments, etc in the legs, ankles and feet.
More specifically there is a rolling motion that goes on when people walk - we push off with our toes and land with our heels.
Getting a robot to walk like us means not just building legs, ankles or feet like ours, it means programming them all to work together in way that is graceful when the robot walks, and that appears to be where the Amber 2 team is headed, 'Phys.Org' reported.
However, Amber 2 is still attached to a boom - it would fall if unleashed.
The engineers on the project are working on an Amber 3 or 4 but there is still the problem of maintaining balance while walking like we do, something that for us at least, has as much to do with our brains, fluid in our ears, and even our arms, as it does with our legs, ankles and feet.
