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Honda Creates Walking Robot
ilyah writes: "The ever-crafty Honda engineers have apparently created a robot that can accurately walk on two legs (i.e. just like humans). Take a look at The Honda Japan site -- a Japanese site that has some pictures and videos worth looking at (hint: videos are under linked marked "04"). It's pretty awesome watching that thing walk around." If I remember correctly, they've been working on this for quite some time - like 15 - 20 years, but this is apparently one of the breakthrough steps, pun intended.
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
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or