FOLLOWING in the footsteps of a long tradition of human-carrying robots, a wheelchair that walks strolled out into public view on 21 November at a Japanese robotics exhibition.
The designers of the peripatetic platform, called WL-16, hope their creation will one day let disabled people do what they cannot in standard wheelchairs and climb up and down stairs. As yet, though, WL-16 cannot accomplish the feat. While it can stride up to 136 centimetres, it is only able to step up and down a few millimetres.
The robot is built from a chair set on top of two sets of…
