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• Honda P3 & Asimo

I can't wait until i see a honda asimo taking troody for a walk down 5th avenue...

But then again, why Is Nissan Motors entitled to that name anyway? 'Nissan' is not their name, it's Nissan Motors (or something to that effect).

For the same reason that the Honda Motor Co. of America's website is here.

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The closest thing we have to mecha in our future will probably be a decendant of Asimo.

• Biohazar d
• Honda P3

This new one, the Asimo is FAR more impressive than the P3. The main improvement (other than the more natural walking ability, of course) is that they have dramatically reduced the weight. According to their website the P2 weighs 210kg (~462lbs) and the P3 weighs 130kg (~286 lbs). The Asimo drops that down to *43*kg (~95 lbs). With a dextrous, humanoid robot that weighs less than an average adult human, you can bet that NASA is going to look at this kind of thing for work on the ISS.

Having discussed extensively design possibilities with the big walker operator and worked a bit on a Walking robot repairs with him while with SRL (www.srl.org), I can attest that the Honda robot is definately an impressive achievement. Stable walking is difficult enough on tripedal and quadropedal robots, and the hacking done at SRL only succeeded in 2 and 3 legged robots, with not much hill-climbing ability, and only moderate speeds. The feedback circuitry and balancing techniques needed for a biped like the Honda robot is, sadly, not yet within reach of even the sophisticated hackers without a ton of money.

The Honda robot qualifies as an "impressive start"... its 2.0km/h speed of the Honda robot is not impressive for a lightweight tri or quad walker, but it is for a bipedal robot of human size.
The fact that it can climb stairs is especially cool, given the extensive rebalancing done every moment in a step, and the feedback sensors needed to read these motions properly.

Certainly there are lifting robots which can hoist many tons, so the 5.0kg/hand weight limit seems skimpy - but not when considering that this machine can allegedly walk and perform complex arm manipulations while holding this weight. Sadly, its continuous runtime before recharge is only 30 minutes, but I suspect later versions will take advantage of increasing innovation in charge/weight ratios in batteries, and perhaps solar panels for space use (an obvious application of these robots would be EVAs for the ISS or other craft).

Cool, in terms of integration with other systems, is the use of wireless ethernet as the comm standard, rather than some proprietary system. This means this robot could be controlled by base-station systems of arbitrary complexity - including a Beowulf cluster running a complex AI system like Webmind. This means that while technology is not quite there yet to put any advanced computational intelligence inside a biped robot, it can be controlled by advanced systems running at fixed-position stations through LAN technology - a good compromise in terms of merging the state-of-the-art in Robotics with AI to try to build towards a better convergence.

Regarding the robustness, it appears that the 25 minutes of runtime is the primary limitation in terms of continuous operation - there is no data I was able to find on failure rates or the fault tolerance of the sensors or computational systems on-board.

As for hacks vs. new general purpose algorithsm... They obviously do not reveal tremendous amounts of details, but suffice it to say that the engineering done to build 3 successive models of bipedal robots that can walk and climb (stairs, hills) represents fundamental work in robot dynamics engineering which, while parameter tweaked for this robot's operations, is certainly applicable (with some tweaks or modifications, as with all engineering techniques) to other bipedal robot applications.

The wireless lan comm technology, improved user interface (over the previous version), and sensor systems are all also certainly reusable in similar robots (indeed, likely also in multi-legged robots).

However, as it is a commercial product AND I do not read Japanese, I was not able to find any papers on specific algorithms to give a more detailed analysis...

Here are some useful resources I did find:

The official site in English

An article about the robot's walking functions

Images of the robot at UIUC

Biped Robots in General

Robodex Robotics Conference

Having discussed extensively design possibilities with the big walker operator and worked a bit on a Walking robot repairs with him while with SRL (www.srl.org), I can attest that the Honda robot is definately an impressive achievement. Stable walking is difficult enough on tripedal and quadropedal robots, and the hacking done at SRL only succeeded in 2 and 3 legged robots, with not much hill-climbing ability, and only moderate speeds. The feedback circuitry and balancing techniques needed for a biped like the Honda robot is, sadly, not yet within reach of even the sophisticated hackers without a ton of money.

The Honda robot qualifies as an "impressive start"... its 2.0km/h speed of the Honda robot is not impressive for a lightweight tri or quad walker, but it is for a bipedal robot of human size.
The fact that it can climb stairs is especially cool, given the extensive rebalancing done every moment in a step, and the feedback sensors needed to read these motions properly.

Certainly there are lifting robots which can hoist many tons, so the 5.0kg/hand weight limit seems skimpy - but not when considering that this machine can allegedly walk and perform complex arm manipulations while holding this weight. Sadly, its continuous runtime before recharge is only 30 minutes, but I suspect later versions will take advantage of increasing innovation in charge/weight ratios in batteries, and perhaps solar panels for space use (an obvious application of these robots would be EVAs for the ISS or other craft).

Cool, in terms of integration with other systems, is the use of wireless ethernet as the comm standard, rather than some proprietary system. This means this robot could be controlled by base-station systems of arbitrary complexity - including a Beowulf cluster running a complex AI system like Webmind. This means that while technology is not quite there yet to put any advanced computational intelligence inside a biped robot, it can be controlled by advanced systems running at fixed-position stations through LAN technology - a good compromise in terms of merging the state-of-the-art in Robotics with AI to try to build towards a better convergence.

Regarding the robustness, it appears that the 25 minutes of runtime is the primary limitation in terms of continuous operation - there is no data I was able to find on failure rates or the fault tolerance of the sensors or computational systems on-board.

As for hacks vs. new general purpose algorithsm... They obviously do not reveal tremendous amounts of details, but suffice it to say that the engineering done to build 3 successive models of bipedal robots that can walk and climb (stairs, hills) represents fundamental work in robot dynamics engineering which, while parameter tweaked for this robot's operations, is certainly applicable (with some tweaks or modifications, as with all engineering techniques) to other bipedal robot applications.

The wireless lan comm technology, improved user interface (over the previous version), and sensor systems are all also certainly reusable in similar robots (indeed, likely also in multi-legged robots).

However, as it is a commercial product AND I do not read Japanese, I was not able to find any papers on specific algorithms to give a more detailed analysis...

Here are some useful resources I did find:

The official site in English

An article about the robot's walking functions

Images of the robot at UIUC

Biped Robots in General

Robodex Robotics Conference

This is not Honda's first robot project - they have been working on them for almost two decades, and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D. Earlier versions include the P2 (1996), and the P3 (1997). As an idea of their progress, here are Honda's specifications for the P2 and P3.

They're impressive beasts, but one has to wonder why they've spent nearly a billion dollars on this. For improving mass production techniques? Possibly, but there are surely better ways. As transport of the future? Hardly.

Since it's likely to be a long time before the gasoline infrastructure goes away, I recommend looking at hybrid gasoline-electric cars. These cars run entirely on regular gasoline; they don't need to be hooked up to an external electric system. They store up extra energy (that a regular car wastes) in batteries, and use this energy later to save gasoline. These cars have the range of a regular car, unlike pure electric vehicles.

Two commericially available hybrid cars are the Honda Insight, and the Toyoto Pruis.

If you get one of these cars, you'll save a fortune on gas while helping to preserve the environment.

This kind of thing is done on purpose. The Japanese don't let us have these things until they have been in use there for several years and we are behind the curve, so to speak (and as it's their products that's their right). It's one way to keep American industry behind Japanese and was done really bad back when Japan had their economy ramped way up.

Ex: Toyota has a car that has a electric/gas hybrid engine called the Prius that gets something like 70mpg in town. This vehicle has been available in Japan for at least five years. It gets released next year in the United States. Honda is releasing the Insight which has the same tech as the Prius this year. Go here and enter a search for the Prius for information about it.Go here for information on the Insight.

In summary... this is nothing new and will continue as long as the Japanese feel that we need to be kept behind them in these things. Nothing evil about it. Just business.

Which are of course ripoffs of honda's VTEC, which is a acronym (abbreviation?) for a real thing! Instead of a meaningless name :).

"Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control"