Italian Researchers Have Built a Humanoid Robot that May One Day Fly Like Iron Man

As robots have steadily expanded their operations out of the controlled environments of research labs and into the chaos of real-world architectural infrastructure, getting from point A to point B has become a major challenge — take stairs, for example. In response, roboticists have developed a number of solutions, from installing rotors so that the robot can helicopter over obstacles or, in Boston Dynamics case, execute backflips that would give Simone Biles pause. And then there’s Daniele Pucci, head of the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence lab at the Italian Institute of Technology, who has taken the audacious step of strapping a fully functional jetpack akin to what Richard Browning developed onto the back of an iRonCub synthetic humanoid with hopes of eventually blasting it into the sky.

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