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The Largest Unpiloted Legged Robot Yet
An unnamed correspondent writes: "Ever wanted your own dinosaur? Well
slap some skin on this baby and you could." This beast looks like a steel elephant, features unusual motor-less joints, and takes a 700Mhz CPU to control each leg.
I would pay big bucks to see this thing attack the hosts of Comedy Central's Battlebots.
I think the british version is much better...
Now I can get my own personal giant ED-209 guard robot within the next few years! Now no one will fuck with me again!
I haven't been this excited since I saw Kenny on South Park wearing an ED-209 halloween costume...
4x4 SUV 's will be replaced by AT AT's
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
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Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I've never been very impressed with Battlebots. I'd rather see autonomous robots fight. You don't need image recognition to do it either. Stick a transponder on each robot for positioning. Robot creators are allowed to do anything they want to prevent the transponder from working, but they are not allowed to physically shut it off. (It could run on its own power source quite easily.) However, ecm bursts for up to 10 seconds could be allowed. Trouble is, each transponder runs on a different frequency, so the ecm would have to be programmable. hehe.
Then, you throw away the lame remote controls, and focus on some good AI routines instead.
The whole idea would increase the overall cost and time to build for each robot, but it would be so much more interesting!
Imagine the thrill of hacking this thing. Issue your own commands, like, STOMP, CHARGE, SPIN IN CIRCLES TILL YOU PUKE, etc....hope that wireless command is encrypted.
"...your future, make it a reality, all you have to do is fight for me"
<Insert evil villain laughter here>
Gekigangar Walk!
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crazy dynamite monkey
Given such a robot the potential for abuse of the technology seems rather high. What if your next door neighbour purchases it to use it as an e-Bouncer that can just walk into your apartment and knock you out? What if it was used to damage properties destroy lives and wreck general havoc? I am not saying it is all wrong but surely some control over the modern technology is a must at this point. Now that AI is advancing in leaps and bounds soon these things will become self aware and the doomsday scenarios that were the domain of SF books can well become a reality. Research on such robots should be controlled by independent international organizations to prevent any potential abuse of the technology.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
This one seemed to get /.ed pretty damn fast, so here's a mirror.
This is a self-referential sig
If it has a pilot it is not a robot.
Whether the pilot is on board or 1e6km away. As the long as the maching is directed by a human it is not a robot.
I hate to see these "news" items about robots that really mean remote controlled devices. Lets keep the terms straight and not get led on by the popular notion that anything remotely high tech is a robot.
Battlebots are not robots. They are funky remote controlled cars playing a mean version of the smash up derby.
With power steering, abs brakes, and ignition control you could probably call most modern car fly by wire systems and describe them as robots using the "great" distinctions of the unwashed public.
Look at your leg. See that bulgey thing below your knee, in the back? That's the linear motor that powers your ankle. The dinosaur robot has *no* motors in its legs. None.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Funny, but also sad. I'm sure this is a fine piece of engineering, but 5.1GB of RAM? Is it running Whistler^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows XP in every shoulder?
With the 4x700MHz PIIIs, that's significantly more processing power than your average dinosaur brain, and they walked a lot better than this beast.
Time to give up on this problem, chaps. AI researchers used to work on chess, because they thought they could never brute force the problem. Now they've done the same to walking. Time to move on to face recognition, or something else.
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E_NOSIG
I want to see two of these beasts mating. Now that would be a robotic scene you wouldn't forget in a hurry...
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Seriously, all humor aside, I think you'd have a hard time getting enough contestants to justify it. The only thing I can think of would be getting a number of colleges to put together teams or something. However, a number of them already compete in similar but more serious events, such as the "International Aerial Robotics Competition"
Well I think you said it... you'd probably get plenty of entries, but maybe more from colleges and companies than individuals.. or perhaps not..I'd certainly never build an r/c bot (dull), but an autonomous one would be more fun!
As well as the aerial robotics thing (a bit too hard, really!), there's also the autonomous robotics soccer competition - teams of opposing robots. Not only do these things track each other and the ball in real time, but they can plan intercept paths to hit the moving ball, and even manage to plot intercept paths to pass the ball to each other! Rather than having a dumb selfish "each man for himself algorithm", the better ones at least use team play. I remember reading about one team who's genetic algorithm optimized team algorithm resulted in player roles and positioning very similar to those in real life soccer!!
There's a web site for the competitions - should be easy to find. AAAI magazine also covers the competitions.
Actually walking and balancing is harder than face recognition (which is old technology now anyway).
If you want to see better walkers then hed over to the MIT web site and visit their "leg lab". This is where walking/hooping/etc robots originated. They even have one with one leg that hops up and down like on a pogo stick!
Is this reviewed in Tom's Hardware Guide? :)
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
Ach, you maroon! Don't theorize about stuff you know nothing about. To say that dinos had significantly less processing power than 4x700MHz PIIIs is silly. It's comparing apples and oranges, and the apples evolved over millions of years and employed genetic algorithms to perfect the most simple seeming actions to an art. The oranges are layers of copper and semiconductor! Research into robotic motion is difficult. Simulators are helpful, but it's tough to model what we can realize - it's much easier to model stuff that just "works". The real-world engineering and design that's required to approximate something as simple as a cockroach is still WAY beyond our abilities as engineers and mechatronics people. Building stuff is a good way to go. You bring the REAL engineering challenges to the top of the pile. Linear actuators. Power dissipation. Balancing problems. Data fusion. Reactive neural networks. Shit man, you're dismissing a whole lot more than a model there. Dork.
Anyone, given budget and time, can throw enough hardware at a problem (making a dinosaur walk, beating the world chess champion) to hide the fact that they haven't solved the problem. That was my point.
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The first big insight on the problem was when Raibert figured out that balance is more important than gait. Locomotion researchers had been obsessing on gait all the way back to Muybridge, and never understood gaits beyond the walk. That's why Raibert did the one-legged hopper, which forced him to focus on balance. This provided the insight that cracked running. The basic concept is that in stance, the goal is to level the body, and in flight, the goal is to land with the foot at the "zero point" landing point which will maintain the current speed and direction. Displacing the landing point slightly from the zero point results in a turn or speed change, and that's how you steer. Very neat.
My big insight on this is that traction control is more important than balance. I figured out (and, of course, patented) how to do anti-slip control for legs. This is necessary to run on hills. One interesting result was that it finally became clear why legs have three joints, considering that two are sufficient to place the foot anywhere. The third (ankle on human, hock on the quadrupeds) joint gives the ability to control the direction of the contact force, which is a big win on non-flat surfaces. This is most true for animals like horses, which have hind legs with three sections of about equal length, but it's true for humans, too. Try climbing in rigid ski boots that lock the ankle joint.
Lots of people have built walkers. It's building a runner that makes it serious.
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
Look at a good pianist. I don't think the bandwidth limitation is with human hands and fingers. Radio remote controls as used in battlebots are legacy systems, designed to control model cars and kludged to control model airplanes. These applications don't involve combat and really just don't require that much bandwidth.
I also think that microsecond reflexes are probably overkill; useful reflex time is limited by the inherent acceleration and deceleration times of the robot's parts. Even cats and mongeese get by with millisecond reflexes.
I'd like to see somebody design a battlebot where they focus on a high-bandwidth control system rather than a bad-ass weapon. (Most of the weapons end up looking pretty lame anyway.) Video cameras are cheap these days, so no reason the operator can't where a headset that gives him a robot's-eye vantagepoint. There are analog joysticks and 6DOF controllers. Bitstreams from multiple controllers could easily be shipped over a radio channel (though it probably makes sense to keep the video stream separate.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?