A new Kickstarter project is working to bring the world of robotics to the masses with a six-legged prototype that can run as fast as a car.
Called "OutRunner," the robot is less than 2 feet tall and weighs about 3 pounds, CBS News reported. With three legs on each side of its motor, the robot emulates a human runner and can reach speeds of 20 mph, running on a variety of terrain for up to two hours on a single battery charge.
"The whole robotic world is really closed off right now," said lead developer Sebastien Cotton, as quoted by CBS. "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."
OutRunner was developed by Robotics Unlimited, a new company that stems from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Described as "the world's first running remote control robot," the OutRunner project had received more than $46,000 so far of a $150,000 goal as of early Monday afternoon.
"One of the hardest things with bipedal locomotion is swinging the leg forward," Cotton described the robot. "That's a very complicated motion, so we took a different approach to simplify the mechanics by having the legs spinning."
If the robot receives full funding, the team plans to finalize design and a corresponding app for the robot this year and ship models to funders by next summer. As of Monday, a limited number of $249 pledges were available for backers to receive an unassembled OutRunner at the lowest price.
So when exactly will everyday consumers need to have a running robot on hand?
"We see a lot of uses for this," said Cotton, as quoted by CBS. "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."
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