Groovy Robot Myrmidons

By: Matthew Battles
October 27, 2009

Boston Dynamics, creators of the quadrupedal robot “BigDog,” bring you “Petman,” a robot modeled on the gait of Mr. Natural.

Unlike Mr. Natural, Petman is stable when pushed.

They say that the robot is designed to test military chemical protection garb. To which I can only say, right! But at least when the androids materialize out of the mist to exterminate us, they won’t be lurching — they’ll be grooving.

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See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Groovy Robot Myrmidons

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