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New Walking Robot From Honda
Jimbob2001 writes: "Forget the Sony AIBO: this new Walking Honda should be the new must have plaything (sorry, not available for sale!).
Here's the slick PR Web site (with movies etc.), and here's the developers' site with a little more detail. (Note the P3 is the latest version of this long-standing development project.)"
The BBC recently carried this story about polymer muscles for microbots. (Not useful on the macro scale, but still interesting.)
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
It is a grand public relations stunt. You are correct that this robot is useless to a consumer, but stunts like this are what fund real robotics.
Some of the technology in this robot:
-binocular vision
-miniturized servo joints
-miniturized controller. (Contollers as large as refrigerators are still used in industry.)
-ballence system adjusting to payload
These technologies are not revolutionary, but important evolutions for industrial robots.
Tell your investors the phrase, "evolutionary reducion in controller size". Boring. Tell them, "walking robot" instead. That's news!
Remember, many manufacturers also sell industrial robots. (Kawasaki and mitsubishi are other examples.) We can say, "anthropomorphic robots are useless," but Honda is going to take the technology they developed for it and apply it immeadiately to industrial robots.
I see 3M as a potential contender, but I have no idea how far any research has progressed into this field.
Once somebody makes such a material, it would only be a matter of time before hobby robotics really take off!
I can see it now, people going out there to buy metal rods, that are held together in a ball-socket joint configuration, and then the muscle strands attached to both pieces of metal, and then wired to the microcontroller. And ofcourse the OS would have to be open-source, Robotix, or just Linux for Robots... Ofcourse Microsoft may still be around, and release Windows RE.
You ask why it's not easy to find stairs.
Among other things, consider the problem with disparity: Looking down gives you horizontal disparity, i.e. the image from one eye is shifted slightly from the image of the other.
Problem is, stairs are horizontally aligned, so there's no "bright line edges" to detect distance from.
Instead, you have to do what the brain does, and search for texture disparity. Good luck; we don't even have compression algorithms that approximate high frequency textures(Perlin Noise isn't hugely flexible nor reversible from real life textures, though I'd wager it could be). To do good binocular disparity on a texture, we need the ability to say, "If the texture was 5 feet away, the two surfaces would differ by x. If the texture was 10 feet away, the two surfaces would differ by y. Now, lets compare these two intrinisically noisy images across multiple texture sizes and detect where in between 5 and 10 feet we are."
Actually, that shouldn't be impossibly different, but it's a hell of alot harder than poking around for a ping pong ball.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Finally I have someone that can walk my Aibo in my absence! :)
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
>P3's carbon rucksack also holds the battery.
I coulda swore the first time I glanced at it, it said "carbon nutsack"
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Where did they find someone skinny enough to fit into the robot suit?
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
You can find a Swedish robot project at http://humanoid.fy.chalmers.se/.
Featuring Elvis (named so because he moved his hips when he learned to walk), who is a tad bit smaller but has learned to walk all by himself (genetic programming).
The Honda walking robot is one example of what many scientests feel is the way forward with regard to artificial intelligence and cybernetic systems development: Instead of trying to replicate core intelligence, many feel that the way to go is to replicate physical functions - IE, to create a "synthetic humanoid", instead of trying to create a "Brain Box", or neural network emulating human synapses and neurons, rather create a "human frame" that duplicates human movement, and from there, slowly "teach" the "organism" using various methods. Even if it comes out as a very slow, sub-ape intelligence-wise, some feel it will be making more progress than neural network/software brain modelling.
I'm of the opinion that the brain is a system like any other, and, like any other system, will eventually have documented interfaces that scientests will be able to write against, creating an emulator, and eventually, a compatible interface. A lot of research going on at my current firm deals with software interfaces for biological structures, as well as analysis of the said biological structures. The future will, have no doubt, be very interesting."A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/
One of the major problems with this robot (I've seen it before, several times over the last few years) is that it requires a massive amount of power. You can only fit so much juice on the machine before the container of said power itself becomes too much of a physical burden on the robot to reasonably pack.
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seumas.com
It isn't sexy and is probably cheating for those who demand strict anthropomorphism, but as a cash-strapped teen hobbyist in the 70's I found that edge detection could be done easily with a cheap IR laser diode casting a stripe at a 45 degree angle (you could probably use an IR LED, but I needed a *bright* dot, or my crappy vidicon tube setup couldn't distinguish in lighting like 'sun streaming through venetian blinds')
It didn't scan and it wasn't pivotable. (Both were planned future upgades that never got done) It was just a fixed optical element that converted tha IR laser 'dot' to a 'stripe'. It could rotate, so that the stripe could assume different angles to the vertical, but +45 and -45 were almost always adequate. The one trick is that the 'stripe' was a better discriminant when projected from near or below the level of the steps, not at head height. The video unit could be anywhere.
IR showed up nicely on the old tubes I used, but was chosen because that's all I could get ($10 a pop *surplus* for the diode alone in 1978). It did made the system look cooler to human eyes, though. A trio of different colored visible light laser stripes would've been a very distinguishable signal in high noise, but that was just a dream back then. Now you can buy color laser pointers with sets of removable holographic gratings for a few bucks. I bet a simple fixed grid holograph at 45 degrees would do the job nicely. A second at 22 degrees would be a great backup.
Subtracting successive beam off/on frames gave me all the info I needed for edge detection with monocular vision. Binocular should give you everything you need to climb stairs, I'd imagine.
Admittedly, the discontinuity detection was more processor intensive than an edge filter, but I'm sure there are more efficient algorithms than the ones I used (and there simply is no comparison between an 0.5MHz 6502 and a GHz Athlon)
The question is: would you rather be totally anthropomorphic or just get the job done?
This approach probably wouldn't work for industrial robotic assembly (which may be why Honda didn't use it). Shiny surfaces, like factory fresh metal parts, really kill the image (and 'beams bouncing everywhere' wouldn't be too kind to bystanders, unless you stuck to low power IR)
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Apparently you can also download the dangerwillrobinson.wav file for this thing.... but I forget the url :)
2 1337 4 u!
Nitinol is cute, but very limited. It needs a huge power to generate a small force - most is wasted in heat.
Mondotronics have a cute project book and kit for Nitinol, which is a splendid birthday present for any geek larvae you might know. Milford Instruments sell it in the UK.
If you want a more workable muscle for small robots, look at the Air Muscle from Shadow Robots. These are interesting because they generate a pull action from air pressure, yet in a small package.
How long could it be before I can get a fully loaded battle mech? Complete with rocket launchers and machine guns? Oh yeah! That'd make the commute to work fun again!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?