Marc Raibert

Marc Raibert

An American roboticist who founded the MIT Leg Laboratory and then Boston Dynamics in 1992, and who established that dynamic balance is easier than static balance: rather than keeping a robot's centre of mass over its feet at all times, let it fall continuously and catch itself, as animals do. His hopping machines led to BigDog, Atlas and Spot, and to control approaches that treat the physical world, with its slips and shoves, as the thing the system must handle rather than an idealisation. (See also: Rodney Brooks, Artificial intelligence (AI))