Meet Little HERMES: a bipedal robot from MIT engineers that can learn from side to side, walk in place, and jump while keeping its balance. It is about a third the size of a human adult with a torso and two legs.
As the above video shows, the robot can mimic the movement of a human. Little HERMES is designed for teleoperation. Here is how the researchers pulled this off:
balance could be stripped down to two main ingredients: a person’s center of mass and their center of pressure … To define how center of mass relates to center of pressure, Joao Ramos gathered human motion data, including measurements in the lab, where he swayed back and forth, walked in place, and jumped on a force plate that measured the forces he exerted on the ground, as the position of his feet and torso were recorded. He then condensed this data into measurements of the center of mass and the center of pressure, and developed a model to represent each in relation to the other, as an inverted pendulum.