Walker

A quadraped walker on display at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum

A walker is a vehicle that moves on legs rather than wheels or tracks. Walkers have been constructed with anywhere from one to more than eight legs. They are classified according to the number of legs with common configurations being one leg (pogo stick or "hopper"), two legs (biped), four legs (quadruped), and six legs (hexapod).

One of the first appearances of such machines in modern literature was the tripods of H. G. Wells' famous The War of the Worlds. The novel does not contain a fully-detailed description of the tripod's (or "fighting-machine", as they are known in the novel) mode of locomotion, however it is hinted at: "Can you imagine a milking stool tilted and bowled violently along the ground? That was the impression those instant flashes gave. But instead of a milking stool imagine it a great body of machinery on a tripod stand."

While the mobility of walkers is arguably higher than that of wheeled or tracked vehicles, their inherent complexity has limited their use mainly to experimental vehicles, primarily robots. Such difficulties have let them be primarily known in fictional works. Real life, larger manned walker vehicles have existed, however, with examples being General Electric's walking truck, the University of Duisburg-Essen's ALDURO, and John Deere's hexapod Walking Forest Machine.

One-legged walkers, hoppers, have been built with some success, but currently the more common walkers are toys like the bipedal QRIO and ASIMO, and the quadruped AIBO. Some walkers such as the BigDog are designed for use in the military. The largest walking machine ever made is the Big Muskie dragliner.

See also

• Artificial powered exoskeleton
• Chicken walker
• Gait
• Motion (physics)
• Robotics

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