Chaos is a cool little robot that is difficult to stop - its four independently controlled tracks let this feisty little guy flail its way past just about anything. Stairs, train tracks, rubble piles, gravel, steep grades of loose debris - the Chaos robot keeps on coming.
Chaos is virtually silent; its battery pack keeps it going for up to three hours and its "ultra-efficient" motor and gearbox let it pack a lot of power into its small size.
Chaos can be fitted with an arm and sensors for HAZMAT situations; it can be operated from a handheld controller or use multi-vehicle autonomous behaviors.
(Chaos robot video)
If you keep watching the video, you notice how it gets stuck and then starts flailing away at obstacles with its flipper-like tracks. It looks oddly like a man trying to swim across rubble. At the end of the video it finds itself flipped over; it performs a cunning maneuver to reorient itself that a man could never do.
The guys who created and test Chaos obviously have a lot of fun with it. They seem to believe that it makes a nifty "land surfing" device, easily climbing stairs with a man standing on top of it.
If you're thinking you've seen tracks that are sort of like these, you're right. Remember Roomba's Brother PackBot?
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!' - Ray Cummings, 1931.
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