University of Michigan’s Engineering School Bipedal Robot “MABEL” Breaks It’s Leg On First Attempt To Walk, Sweetness.

Below is a video of a robot from the University of Michigan’s engineering school, named MABEL and it’s a bipedal robot. Not much else to it, other then the little incident of it falling over causing me to laugh hysterically.

In this experiment, we are evaluating the inherent robustness of MABEL’s ‘almost’ nominal gait.
Question: How far can MABEL step down without falling? To find out, the robot goes until it falls.

She was able to handle a 2.5 inch (6.35 cm) drop off. In the end, she did not really fall. Each shin has a built in mechanical fuse that gives way when the load on the leg exceeds a threshold. This is done to avoid damage to the bearings in the hips. The experiment stopped when the fuse in MABEL’s shin gave way. The resulting fall is quite spectacular, but does not damage the robot. It takes about an hour to reassemble the leg.