Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has developed ‘BowGo’ – a new kind of Pogo stick that bounces higher, farther and more efficiently than conventional devices. It is a scaled-up, human-sized version of the Bow Leg, a highly resilient leg being developed for running robots also developed by Carnegie Mellon.

 

CMU's Robotics Institute is also the organizer of the upcoming Pogopalooza event in Pittsburgh and has stated that BowGo is likely to feature in the high jump events. BowGo will get their bounce from a fiberglass bow of high tensile strength.

 

The Robotics Institute has stated that the sticks get their springiness from a fiber-reinforced composite bow that packs up to five times much elastic energy per unit of mass as a steel coil spring. The bending bow also precludes the friction that results when coil springs buckle sideways. Its efficiency is further enhanced by using rollers to guide the stick’s plunger, rather than the usual plastic bushings.

 

Ben Brown, a Robotics Institute project scientist who invented BowGo stated that his device feels very different from other pogo sticks, including the extreme sticks now on the market that use elastic bands or air springs. The usage is very smooth and allows athletes to jump very high.

 

Brown in the eighties had been studying a series of one-legged hopping robots at the lab of Marc Raibert, then a faculty member at the Robotics Institute. The hoppers had power-hungry hydraulic legs and were tethered to external power sources and computer controls. But Brown begin to study about making the dynamic legs efficient and make the running hopping robot to operate without a power tether.

 

In the nineties Brown along with a team of technicians managed to fashion a cheap, low-tech bow leg out of piano wire. The design was efficient, capable of releasing 80 percent of the energy that was stored when the bow was bent. Brown’s design was small, weighing only a few pounds and to test whether the technology scaled up, Brown’s team and Illah Nourbakhsh, associate research professor of robotics, in early 2000 developed a human-size bow leg – the BowGo.

 

Brown said that the BowGo is not yet commercially available, though the technology is patented and discussions are under way with a possible marketer.

 

Disney had announced R&D Labs with Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and Caterpillar Inc. had partnered for developing autonomous versions of large haul trucks employed in mining operations.