- Associated Press - Monday, May 26, 2014

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - A six-legged robot designed and built in Pensacola is making waves in the online tech community.

OutRunner is the creation of Robotics Unlimited, a spinoff of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition headed by research scientist Sebastien Cotton.

“The whole robotic world is really closed off right now,” Cotton said. “If you’re not an engineer with a Ph.D., well, you won’t be able to play with robots. I want to change that, so I started my company to commercialize robots.”

Though not yet commercially available, OutRunner has been featured online by Stuff magazine, Gizmag and the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail, among other publications.

It’s being touted as the fastest-running robot in the world.

The robot itself, which its creators say can reach speeds up to 20 mph and run for two hours on a single charge, is less than 2 feet tall, weighs about 3 pounds, and has three legs on either side of a central motor and processing unit.

It’s appearance comes from necessity, Cotton said.

“One of the hardest things with bipedal locomotion is swinging the leg forward,” Cotton said. “That’s a very complicated motion, so we took a different approach to simplify the mechanics by having the legs spinning.”

OutRunner runs by rotating both sets of legs in time so that as a foot on one side is lifted, the one on the other is planted, much like how humans and many animals run.

Cotton said he and his team have been working on OutRunner for about the past year and that he got the idea for the running robot after working on a bipedal robot project called FastRunner for the IHMC.

“We see a lot of uses for this,” Cotton said. “First, for people who love to build and take apart things, it’s perfect because OutRunner is completely upgradable. It also can be educational because it’s very fun for kids to play with and easy to use. We want people to be able to play with real robots without having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

A Kickstarter campaign to bring OutRunner to the public has already garnered more than 70 backers and $15,000 in support, though that’s far from the campaign’s June 7 goal of $150,000.

And because Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing affair, Cotton and company won’t see a dime if the $150,000 goal isn’t met.

A YouTube video of an OutRunner prototype shows the robot running through the long-empty Pensacola Technology Park, perhaps making the Robotics Unlimited team the first to use the campus for technological research.

Cotton said he and his team have dubbed the technology park road “robot run.”

OutRunner will come in two models: core and performance, Cotton said. Both models will be operated by radio control, though the performance model will have an accompanying smartphone app able to control it as well.

The performance model also will be faster and have a built-in camera, along with other under-the-hood perks. The core model will start at $299, with the performance model running a cool $799, Cotton said.

“One of the good things about the project is you can start out with the core model and upgrade it piece by piece to the performance level,” he said.

A timeline for OutRunner’s development has the Robotics Unlimited team finalizing the robot’s design and smartphone app through the rest of 2014, with early models being shipped to Kickstarter backers late in the year.

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Information from: Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, https://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com

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