A Glimpse at the Past: The Military's First Quadroped

28.05.2011
What's 11 feet tall, walks on 4 legs and drinks gasoline? That's easy--it's General Electrics first quadroped war machine!

Development first began in 1962 by the General Electric Ordinance Dept. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts under a study for the US Army to build manned walking machine to get through rough terrain that other vehicles can't; it was called the "". In 1965, impressed by the results of the study, the Department of Defense asked GE to build the Pedupulator and GE soon had a working model. That's right folks, GE and the military had a working quadroped before Star Wars even dreamed up the (Star Wars' screenplay drafts first began in 1973)

The quadroped was suppose to be designed to have 12-foot legs and to walk at a 35 mile per hour speed. The operator, a fleshy human, was directly in charge of the machines movement--no microcontrollers interface. By making movements with their own human limbs the operator would tell the robot what limbs to move through the use of hydrolics. The Pedipulator was to be built large enough to contain not just the operator but also circuits, servos, and of course power units (gas tanks--this thing eats gas right?) Check out , a history of cybernetic animals and early robots, to get the .

While it's no AT-AT walker, that's for sure, and I don't see any laser cannons shooting from it it's definitely awesome to think that the US actually had a working quadroped back in the 1960s. The narrator claims (in the ) that the interfacing of this technology with the more advanced one in the future will bring us that much closer to a machanical man (creepy). It's ashame that the project was cut due to funding because you can just imagine where the quadroped technology would be today almost 50 years after its inception.

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