The pogo stick meets robotics

Carnegie Mellon's BowGo could bounce competition at Pogopalooza event

We've written about Carnegie Mellon researchers raising Charles Darwin from the dead, building a robo-tank and developing a gigapixel camera for the masses. But they might have really outdone themselves with the BowGo, a super bouncy pogo stick from CMU's Robotics Institute that the organizer of next week's Pogopalooza event in Pittsburgh says is likely to shine in the high jump (possibly via 9-foot-high jumps).  Ben Brown, a Robotics Institute project scientist who invented BowGo about 9 years ago, said the sticks get their springiness from a fiber-reinforced composite bow that packs up to five times as much elastic energy per unit of mass as a steel coil spring. BowGos are not commercially available, but demand from extreme athletes could change that.

• Carnegie Mellon
• CMU
• pogo stick
• robotics