The Trojan Cockroach, or Walking Robot, was developed by Ivan Sutherland during a tenure as a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon. After conversations with Marc Raibert, who headed up a legged locomotion lab here in the 1980s, Sutherland decided to build a robot that a person could ride. The resulting robot had 6 legs and needed no internal balance system since three of its legs remained on the ground at any time. Powered by hydraulics to lift and move the legs, the Trojan Cockroach was a slow-moving machine, but remains important for being the earliest example of a computer-controlled robot capable of carrying a human. It no longer exists as it was later dismantled.
