Does the Uncanny Valley extend to re-creations of our four-legged friends? We'll find out soon enough if Yasunori Yamada and his University of Tokyo engineering team manage to get their PIGORASS quadruped bot beyond its first unsteady hops, and into a full-on gallop. Developed as a means of analyzing animals' musculoskeletal system for use in biologically-inspired robots, the team's cyborg critter gets its locomotion on via a combo of CPU-controlled pressure sensors and potentiometers. It may move like a bunny (for now), but each limb's been designed to function independently in an attempt to simulat
