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A Pittsburgh-based robotics and engineering startup recently unveiled
Moonwalkers, a pair of battery-powered shoes that it claims can boost
walk speeds by up to 250%.
At first glance, Moonwalkers look like a pair of futuristic rollerskates,
but there is actually a lot more to them than that. You’re actually
meant to walk with them the way you would regular shoes or sneakers,
letting the motorized wheels put a spring in your step. Powered by a
state-of-the-art brushless DC motor, this ingenious contraption is
actually a platform that can be attached to a wide variety of footwear
to significantly increase your walking speed up to a reported
7mph/11kph. For comparison, humans’ average walking speed ranges from
2.5 to 4 mph. The sensation of walking with the world’s fastest shoes
has been compared to that of walking on a ‘moving walkway’ in an
airport.
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Designed by Shift Robotics, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University,
Moonwalkers consist of a 300W brushless motor in each 4.2-lb (1.9-kg)
shoe that powers eight polyurethane wheels. There is also an AI-powered
gearbox that increases or decreases speed according to data regarding
the wearer’s walk collected by a series of sensors. The shoes are also
able to detect downhill movement to prevent accidents.
“Moonwalkers are not skates. They’re shoes. The world’s fastest shoes
actually,” Xunjie Zang, founder and CEO of Shift Robotics said. “You
don’t skate in them. You walk. You don’t have to learn how to use them,
the shoes learn from you.”
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But do the world’s fastest shoes work on uneven terrain, or things like
stairs? We all know how tricky those are to mitigate in rollerskates.
Well, apparently the designers took that into consideration and
implemented a simple gesture that allows the wearer to lock the wheels
so that they can walk up or down stairs as they would in regular
footwear.
Moonwalkers were recently unveiled as part of a Kickstarer campaign that
has already reached almost double its crowdfunding goal of $90,000. The
first batch is expected to ship in March of 2023, at a retail price of
$1,399. That’s not cheap, but then again, this isn’t your average pair
of shoes, it’s the world’s fastest pair of shoes.
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