Walking Truck is the ancestor of all modern robots

Back in the 1960s, an American company, General Electric, introduced its Walking Truck robot, large and strong enough to move cars and jeeps like matchboxes.

The Walking Truck was designed and manufactured in 1965 by Ralph Mosher, an engineer at General Electric.

This mechanical experimental system, whose full name is Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine (CAM) and weighs 1,360 kilograms, was created for exactly the same purposes for which the BigDog robot was created, for carrying cargo over rough terrain and for providing other types of support to employees of infantry and special forces units.

As you can see in the video below, the Walking Truck robot, which was operated by a specially trained person, was very far from the mobility and agility of the BigDog robot, which operated under the control of a computer system. But its clumsiness and a small speed of movement, which was only 8 kilometers per hour, the robot more than compensated for its power, which was enough to push a jeep stuck in the mud with one kick, or destroy the obstacle with blows to the front limbs.

Despite all the further prospects of using robotics in the military field, the Walking Truck robot proved too cumbersome and slow for its practical application. Therefore, General Electric later ended the CAM program, and the only prototype of the Walking Truck robot is now in the U.S. Army Transportation Museum, Fort Eustis, Virginia.

Source: ridus.ru