Their leader, a tall man with
the build of a gazelle, windswept blond hair, and a permanent grin, starts extolling the possibilities of his device before he remembers to introduce himself.
«Look at a
gazelle — all
of its software is in its brain,» says James Kuffner, an associate professor at C.M.U.'s Robotics Institute, one
of six teams
of robotics researchers (along with the Florida University System's Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, M.I.T., Stanford University, the University
of Southern California and the University
of Pennsylvania) that DARPA asked to improve on the same basic LittleDog quadruped robot platform,
built for them by Boston Dynamics.
You can find all
of Disrupt Africa's coverage here, but major takeaways include that African angel investors should «hunt in packs», investors should focus on «
gazelles» rather than «unicorns», and that African startup ecosystems will not be
built overnight.