Gadgetory

it's the end of another year and more of our cherished pastimes here at CNET is to take a look back at all the awesome new robot achievements that happened there were a bunch of great milestones for robots in 2018 and these are our absolute favorites let's kick things off with a four-legged robot beast with a special kind of handicap cheetah 3 is an MIT creation and it's pretty impressive it's a blind robot meaning it doesn't use any vision based tech like cameras to navigate the world around it the idea is to develop a robot that can use feel or touch to figure out how to traverse things like uneven terrain and in 2018 we watched cheetah 3 take a wobbly journey up a short staircase in the future we may see cheetah threes descendants performing work teams too dangerous for humans blind locomotion you never look so good now that we've celebrated a cat robot how about a dog oh it's so nice I'm oh this adorable little robot dog got a reboot this year and our very own Bridget Carey spent a week with Ivo introducing it to her daughter a real dog and some senior citizens she found it charming especially for a dog that runs off a battery it's the only robot on our list you can actually buy but the almost $3,000 price tag is enough to scare away all but the most dedicated Robo dog fans from picking one up it's still an amazing achievement and future iterations could go a long way in acting as companions for anyone who can't handle a live pet a robot dog might not be in your future but there's a good chance our next entry might make an appearance in your life Disney's stickman started off as a straight piece of metal but soon evolved into a robotic stunt double capable of some pretty incredible acrobatics in 2018 we watched as Disney Imagineering research and development released a video showing off the newest iteration of stickman doing tricks even the bravest stunt doubles might think twice about these machines are the future of Disney's already believable animatronics and will likely performin shows at disney parks around the globe sometime in the future the only misstep not naming it a crobat so obvious another human s robot made our list this year but it's a little less entertainment and a little more terminator it's Atlas one of our all-time favorite robots this bipedal bot has been in the public eye since 2013 and now five years later Boston Dynamics swole super machine learned how to parkour every major milestone from him is always a delight to watch and this year's update was no different he left over a log he found it over boxes and pretty soon he'll be hunting humans for sport and trying to kill John Connor of course I'm joking joking or am i and last but certainly not least on our list of 2018 s greatest Robo achievements it's NASA's insight Rover we all watch this global scientific effort reach Mars in November touching down and marking the first major spacecraft landing on the red planet since curiosity did it in 2012 it's got a big job in sight is designed to study Mars as crust mantle and core hopefully providing scientists with new information about rocky planet formation in our own solar system we've already gotten some selfies from insight as well as some audio from Mars itself we'll definitely be watching insights Twitter feed for more as its mission continues so those are our favorites was there something we missed scream really loudly at your screens so that I can hear you we can't wait to see what 2019 holds for the future of Robotics until next year be good meet backs