Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Largest Unpiloted Legged Robot Yet

Posted by timothy on from the my-gawd-*look*-at-that! dept.

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.

6 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Something I'd like to see by Aggrazel · · Score: 5

    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...

  2. Mirror by mberman · · Score: 5

    This one seemed to get /.ed pretty damn fast, so here's a mirror.

    --

    This is a self-referential sig

  3. Re:watch out by GypC · · Score: 5

    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.

  4. Re:A 700 MHz CPU for each leg... by Rupert · · Score: 5

    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.

    --

    --

    --
    E_NOSIG
  5. Re:Sniff the wireless commands....AND.... by jheinen · · Score: 5

    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
  6. Re:A 700 MHz CPU for each leg... by Animats · · Score: 5
    What makes you think biology doesn't brute-force the problem? Over half the human brain, and more than half of the lower mammal brains, is devoted to balance and coordination. It's a reasonably compute-intensive problem.

    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.