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Even as I agree with your point: http://www.robots-dreams.com/2010/02/3d-printing-robot-parts-is-a-reality-already-video.html
"We often get into discussions and debates about the potential for 3D printing, especially as it relates to robotics. We tend to take the positive side of the debate, and paint a rosy picture of what we believe to be a not-too-distant future where researchers, developers, and even hobbyists will be able to crank out real-world manifestations of their dream concepts, and test them under practical conditions at reasonable cost and with very short timeframes. ... Well, now we have a great example to actually show them..."

The "battle bots" are mostly the usual stupid R/C "battery-motor-wheels" stuff. But some of the humanoid hobbyist robots on display are getting good. Dynamixel servos, which have useful feedback to the controller, are taking over. (They have a 1mb/sec polled serial link shared by all the servos. It's RS-485, which is 1970s technology, but that's progress over the usual one-way PWM interface.) The latest prototype Dynamixel servos can reach 500 degrees/sec, which means there's hope of making legged running work. Some of the humanoid robots have a 6DOF inertial unit, although balancing software is way below the Big Dog level and none of the humanoids had force-sensing feet.

The better hobbyist humanoids are almost at the hardware level at which Asimo/Big Dog performance becomes possible. The more advanced robot hobbyists now understand about ZMP. We're getting there.

For better coverage, see Robots-Dreams, which also covers the Japanese hobbyist robot scene.

Terrible article. See Robots Dreams for what's really going in Japanese hobbyist robotics. Especially what's happening with small humanoid robot competitions. Obstacle courses are routine now.

This stuff is way ahead of the Lego Mindstorms, Battlebots, anf FIRST stuff you see in the US.

I'd like to see Big Dog balance technology scaled down to toy size. It's not inherently expensive. All the cleverness is in the software and the math.

The source article says 18 kg, not 8 kg. 8 kilo might get you a wheelbarrow.

"weighs 18 kg (just under 40 pounds)"
- http://www.robots-dreams.com/2008/01/new-robot-suit.html

Cute.

The interesting research results have to do with control strategies for providing good ride quality. Biped walking machines have been around for some years now, but usually jounce around too much. They've addressed that problem. One more step towards robust biped machines.

Now the question is whether they can get the stride length up. That's when it starts to get hard. The linear approximations they're using start to diverge from reality too much.

The latest generation of hobbyist robots from Japan are almost good enough for serious research work. They need inertial units, more compute power, and better comm links, but the mechanics look quite good. Hobbyist robotics is about at the Apple I point - there's decent hardware advanced hobbyists can buy, but it's not quite ready for prime time. The academics tend to have good theory but expensive, one-off hardware, while the hobbyists have mass produced hardware but primitive software. It's like computing in 1976. Two more years and this stuff will really start to work.

There's a lot of academic theory that needs to be moved into the hobbyist robots, which tend to have really dumb controllers, and not due to lack of compute power. The hobby robotics people are going to have to learn more math, much as game developers did when games went from 2D to 3D.

Whilst it's laudable that companies are investing in robotics at all, it seems to me that the time has come for investment on a commercial scale in robotics for specific applications. These 'hobby' type robots are all well and good (and no doubt particularly appealing to many around here) but they don't actually DO very much of any use, and the average member of the public is not going to be all that excited by them.

Hey, something like 60% of Roomba owners name the things, and those things rate slightly above wind-up toys and below a Furby in smarts. There's a market for those things. Of course, there's a market for the Ionic Breeze air cleaner, which doesn't even clean air.

What this new effort sounds like is an alternative to FIRST robotics, but at a lower price point.

The real action starts around $1000. Check out Robots-Dreams.org, which covers Japanese and other hobbyist humanoid robots. There are four or five makers of those things now, and they're very impressive.

Hobbyist robotics tends to be weak on sensors and terrible on sensor fusion, but once anyone can get working hardware, that should improve. There's been enormous progress in vision processing in the last five years, but it hasn't filtered down to the hobbyists yet, even though the hardware isn't the problem there.

Kuffner (above) is right, of course. Dynamically stabilized walking has been around for years. It's not easy to do, but it's been done. Raibert first did it in the 1980s. See his book, "Legged Robots that Balance".

Most of the self-balancing walkers, as Kuffner points out, use a ZMP-based approach. This works for walking, although it's not quite enough for effective running.

Many of the dynamically balanced robots can rebalance after a shove. BDI's Big Dog can. So can some Japanese hobbyist robots.

If you're not up to date on how far along Japanese hobbyist robotics has progressed, see these videos of this month's humanoid robot soccer match. These robots are mostly manually controlled, but have computers managing some functions. Many have rate gyros to assist with balance. Gradually, the computers and sensors are taking over more of the control. The hobby robotics manufacturers in Japan now have about 70% of the functionality of Asimo at 2% of the price. There are hobbyist robots with WiFi links and cameras on board. A few more improvements and you'll be able to do all the Asimo stuff with a $1500 robot. But it will only be about 60cm high.

This is a significant change in direction for Bill Gates. Up until 2000 or so, he'd publicly stated that robotics wasn't going anywhere.

I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot, so I'm reasonably familar with what's going on in this area. It was amazing to me how much progress was made in three years. Much of the progress was in subsystems. Four years ago, a high precision combination GPS/INS/compass system cost about $100,000, and required 4U of rack space with air conditioning. (CMU's first vehicle actually had such a unit.) Now, such units are about $6K, the size of a thick book, and don't need A/C. LIDAR units have gone from mechanical line scanners to solid state 3D flash units; although these are still expensive, low-volume items, there's no fundamental reason they couldn't be brought down to camcorder prices.

More interestingly, computer vision in unstructured environments is actually starting to work. That was the real innovation in the Stanford vehicle - a vision system that could look at a distant section of a road and decide if it was similar to the nearby section. Several LIDAR units profiled the near section, and if the near section was OK and the far section was visually similar, the vehicle could outdrive its LIDAR range. I was amazed that that worked, but it did. It's a Bayesian statistics system, and quite clever.

Then there are the new generation of hobbyist robots. See Robots Dreams, which follows Japanese hobby robotics. You can get a good humanoid robot about 50cm high for about $1000 now. It's interesting how this happened. Robotics hobbyists have been playing around with R/C servos for decades, and quietly, under consumer pressure, those servos have been getting better. The motors used to be too weak, but better magnets fixed that. Then people complained of bearing failure, so the manufacturers switched to ball bearings. Then applied loads would sometimes strip gear teeth, so the manufacturers had to go to better gear materials. Then the things were overpowered for their dumb control algorithm, so each servo got an embedded micro controller. Then it was necessary to tune the control algorithm depending on load, so the interface became more intelligent and bidirectional. And suddenly we had servos strong enough for the legs of a small running robot.

In the hobbyist community, though, the software is way too dumb. Hobbyists are still using BASIC STAMPs and typically don't do much very exciting on the control front. By contrast, Grand Challenge vehicles typically had many CPUs running highly concurrent software. We had two Pentium IV machines running QNX and running about fifteen real time programs, along with five programmable motor controllers each closing some control loop. Gates is onto something with building better tools for hobbyist robotics. The Microsoft approach to robotics is clunky (it's a rehash of web technologies, including SOAP), but it has more integration than anything seen before, so it will catch on.

Once we get the theory and technology from the high end down into hobbyist level hardware, things are really going to take off. We have the parts now.

The important site to look at is Robots Dreams, which covers Japanese robotics work. The little humanoid robots at the $1000 level are getting quite good mechanically. The best ones now have maybe 70% of the hardware functionality of Asimo at under 1% of the cost. They're typically remote controlled, but, because they have more degrees of freedom than a human can control with an R/C controller, preprogrammed movements were added. That wasn't good enough, so some hobbyists have added gyros and balance reflexes. Now it starts to get serious.

The hobbyists are doing some very good work. There are competitions and battles for these things. Obstacle courses which look like something from Army basic training. The battles aren't just banging away like Robot Wars; these machines can execute judo throws.

More to the point, the hobbyists are making progress much faster than the academic robotics people ever did. There are more of them, enough to drive a market for mass-produced parts. That makes it easier to build the things.

If you took the best kit humanoid available (which costs about $1200), added a 6DOF inertial unit (a few hundred dollars and getting cheaper every year), a stereo vision system (or even a SwissRanger minature LIDAR), better force sensors in the feet and hands, and a WiFi link, you'd have ASIMO-level capability for a few thousand dollars. We'll probably see that within two years, and probably at a low price point.

Then it's all software. And there's lots of theory out there just waiting to be used. This is going to be fun.

When the original post on Robots Dreams http://www.robots-dreams.com/2006/02/a_car_and_a_r ob.html was picked up by Engadget it did generate enough hits that the robot-fan.net server crashed. After that the video was moved to youtube.com to handle the traffic. The WR-07 robot was developed by Nakamura-san of Himeji Soft Works in Japan. It's not currently for sale, but who knows. The interest has been way beyond anything Nakamura-san hoped for. There's more information in English on the original post.

When the original post on Robots Dreams http://www.robots-dreams.com/2006/02/a_car_and_a_r ob.html was picked up by Engadget it did generate enough hits that the robot-fan.net server crashed. After that the video was moved to youtube.com to handle the traffic. The WR-07 robot was developed by Nakamura-san of Himeji Soft Works in Japan. It's not currently for sale, but who knows. The interest has been way beyond anything Nakamura-san hoped for. There's more information in English on the original post.