Slashdot Mirror
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...
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!
This one seemed to get /.ed pretty damn fast, so here's a mirror.
This is a self-referential sig
Elephants manage just fine on grass, and they often weigh over 10,000 pounds. In fact, they are downright stealthy on turf. Ever been snuck up on by an elephant? Talk about a good scare, I thought hair on the back of my neck would never lie back down.
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
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
Since the "Lone Gunmen" have shown us that it is possible to hack into the primary flight controls of an airliner in flight, hacking this bad boy should be no problem. What this thing REALLY needs is a couple of Octium IVs (tm).
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
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.