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A Robot Carries Humans, Another One Plays Flute
Roland Piquepaille writes "The New Scientist says that a robot able to carry humans was demonstrated in Tokyo. The robot, developed at Waseda University in Tokyo and the Japanese robotics company tmsuk, 'uses 12 actuators to move forwards, backwards and sideways while carrying an adult weighing up to 60 kilograms (130 pounds).' It will be used 'in the fields of welfare, as an alternative to wheelchairs, which can go up and down stairs.' The Takanishi Laboratory carries other projects, including a flutist robot. More details and references are contained in this overview, which also includes a picture of the flutist robot in concert."
I push people down the stairs.
I am the shover robot - I shove people down the stairs
One step closer to making all those giant robot animes a reality !
Great, at 130 pounds the American population is out of luck.
while carrying an adult weighing up to 60 kilograms (130 pounds)
Only 130lbs?! Looks like I'll be carrying the robot on my way out of the burning building.
-Valiss
If it can teach Physics, then my Physics teacher has now been outsourced..
Sorry, mr robot, without knees having legs is probably worse than wheels.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Anyone else think that they meant "carry" as in a woman carrying a human child in her placenta?
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
a robot able to carry humans was demonstrated in Tokyo
I know of another robot that can carry humans AND at up to speeds of 300mph. It's called a car.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Somewhere, Dean Kamen is scoffing mightily.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/285231.asp
Pretty neat. I wonder how long before they combine this with a realdoll? Think of the possibilities! :-)
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
That'd be a big seller.
We must protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
What is needed is a robot that will help disabled people get in and out of bed. My aunt has a disabled child who is wheelchair bound and needs help getting in and out of bed. So when they get an all-purpose walking/moving/assisting robot that will do those tasks, then they'll have something with a BIG market!
...would be able to carry your average slashdotter!
Guess it won't be carrying Taco or any other fat geeks.
As someone who has worked with the disabled in nursing homes and hospice care, I can only say that this is a BRILLIANT idea. You can not imagine how difficult it is to care for people who through mental or physical disability can not lift themselves. Forget the Roomba, a robot for assisting the disabled in moving and transferring would be a real, true blessing.
Damn people ... all I hear is negativity ... ever heard of baby steps? in my eyes, this is freakin amazing ... pretty soon we'll have alien/matrix like exo-skeletons, and they were born out of clumsy robots with no knees.
Is it just me, or does this article sound like it was written by a five year old?
...when they teach them to play a skin-flute.
Well I can dream ;-)
So it's not going to be much use over here in McUSA then... :)
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
A robot that can carry me? And here I am, using my OWN legs like a chump.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Surely this Covers the climbing up stairs thing, not to mention the reaching high places, as well as not looking quite so conspicuous as being carried round by a dirty great robot when youre out shopping.
"will be used 'in the fields of welfare, as an alternative to wheelchairs"
How can a cool expensive robot like that be used for welfare? Are they giving them away to crippled children in vietnam, who has had their legs blown off by a mine? While that certainly would be nice, I can think of better use of the money for the same purpose: buying 100 times more wheelchairs to the children.
Actually, he's only 120, and I think he likes robots too.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
same technology, inventor, and company as the Segway.
--
There is no hatred more pure and true than that expressed by children.
Pretty soon they'll be wanting voting rights and they'll be forming unions. Then Ford will have to outsource their car manufacturing overseas where the robots work for less and aren't held to the same stringent emissions standards we have here. It's just a downward spiral from here, folks...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't most adult humans weigh more than 130 pounds?
--
There is no hatred more pure and true than that expressed by children.
I sure wouldn't like to see when the robot goes frenzy on the poor old sods.
*BZZZT* "Kill all humans!"
I always said that they would get the crippled and weak ones first.
...shouldn't a scientist know that they're referred to as "flautists?"
Wow, it looks like the human carrying robot has an awfully high center of gravity to me. I'd feel uncomfortable sitting up there even when it's at rest.
I understand that for climbing stairs and such, some extension would be required, but surely using a different kind of base (multi-sectioned telescoping sections?) would make it a little lower in general?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Yuk! Not those. On the other hand, if they can make it look like Brook Burke .. ooooohhhhh
There is no spoon or sig.
True but wheelchairs aren't very good at going down stairs... well the one I pushed the other day seemed to have a problem going back down... !
Unbelievably old-hat. A flute-playing automaton was constructed before 1750. Search for Vaucanson (the inventor) and flute (the instrument)--it's no secret, though the current developers fail to mention this prior art.
I hope they are careful about shielding their electonics. I knew a guy who was a high level quadriplegic who steered his electic wheel chair with his chin. One day he was in a subway station and as a train came up the strong electromagnetic fields caused his chair to go geserk. He was *very* frightened. Someone grabbed his chair and turned it off.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
I'm a slim 120 Lbs. Looks like I'm getting out alive!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Old hat? Look, the bowler never goes out of style. In fact, I'm proud to see that robots are starting to sport them too
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
They came, they carried, they conquered.
A better image is available here.
ôó
Klaatu barada nikto!
I'm 140 lbs...
damnit.
now I cant have a robot I can ride to do all the dirty work.
This is certainly interesting, but people have been building single task robots for over 200 years.We really should have mechas by now.
The flute robot for me is far more impressive. It uses more intricate actuators, like fingers. It obviously has to to this quickly and precisely to play the flute properly - cool
...mumble....coffee...mumble...late night....
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
Yeah, I guess there's no point in making a robot that can carry people without working legs, since you have a pair.
When are you showing up to take us all out shopping?
I know the Japanese are fairly small (in general), but only up to 130 pounds??
Yikes!
Up to a few decades ago, the bigger and stronger you were, the more chance you had to survive. But now, the smaller you are the less power you'll need from your assistive technologies to support you, and the longer you will last.
The comments I read were really lame. This is an important step forward folks.
A practical walking machine should probably have 6 legs and be able to trott like a horse. Imagine how useful such a machine would be for mineral exploration. When such a machine can scale a scree slope then this means that mankind will not have to hike in 20 miles in order to check out a claim.
A machine that can walk over windfalls would be more fun than a bike.
I think the OpenSource community can program one. But I've not heard of any takers. If we could even simulate a walking machine we'd be well on the way because actually building the actuators is not going to be very difficult... what is difficult is writing the code to control them.
"forwards, backwards and sideways while carrying an adult weighing up to 60 kilograms (130 pounds)"
:D
includes a picture of the flutist robot in concert
i thought they already had one, called the realdoll?
my blog
When did that become an acceptable spelling? I alsways thought it was 'flautist'. *sigh*
I think they have everyone fooled. Note the speakers and subwoofer at the bottom of the pic. ;) Why whould a flute playing robot need speakers?
Seriously though, this is very impressive. From the lung to the lips and mouth like piece that makes the air come out is if from a normal mouth, it's amazing. I'd like to hear how it sounds and I'd be interested in the software that was made to convert the midi notes into breath strength/time and the finger movements.
A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity
Why don't we just make the bed itself a robot?
Oh wait that's already been tried.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Robots. One acts as a wheelchair to carry handicapped people around, walking up stairs, etc., while the other plays the flute in a band. Every time I see the useful functions of robots I get worried. I'm a Luddite -- or should I say somewhat self-protective of the human race. I'm not scared of Aibo or the Honda Sapien, they just walk around and look human. But when I see robots replacing human beings, I worry that we're one step closer to obsolesence. We are replaceable by robots which will soon be superior to us in every way. I just hope they don't think like humans, or they will perform ethnic cleansing on us. Will robots have their own Darwinian philosopher advocating survival of the fittest?
I'd better ask Cory Doctorow, or better yet, Ray Kurzweil.
There is a good pretty-new book about old automata--Gaby Woods "Edison's Eve" (at Amazon). It mentions the Japanese flute-player--apparently the Japanese researcher simply didn't believe Vaucanson was possible
How could they not have researched previous art before starting the flute-player in 1990? Duplicating a 252-year-old invention is pathetic. And it seems, except for replacing adjustible cams with computer control and adding motors, that is all the Japanese did.
I think the OpenSource community can program one. But I've not heard of any takers. If we could even simulate a walking machine we'd be well on the way because actually building the actuators is not going to be very difficult... what is difficult is writing the code to control them.
Find us a hundred copies of the same robot at an affordable price. Until then the open source development model isn't really going to work like it does with computers.
carrying an adult weighing up to 60 kilograms (130 pounds).
o tector) type
What "adult" weighs 60 kilos? Guess the "wear-pocket-protector-to-protect-their-pocket-pr
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it's FLOUTIST!
I belong to the ______ generation.
Sorry - it's the first time I've hit a mod score of 5 before :-)
Should have registered instead of being a/c though.
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=287
and i'd also just like to say, LOL! 5 golden manbabies!
Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway, also created the IBOT, a wheelchair that can climb stairs and rise up to put disabled people at eye level of standing people. It's a pretty amazing invention. Did I mention that it can hold up to 250 pounds?
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
the Daleks from Doctor who, not even stairs will save us from extermination!
He who fights with Monkeys must take it upon himself not to become a Monkey.
Although the pic shows it's a walking wheelchair, I was hoping for an Asimo-type bot that would save the pretty Japanese girl from a burning building, give a thumbs-up to the cameras and then down a bottle of Olde Fortran before activating its death ray eyes and going on a killing spree. Oh my, yes...
You must think in Russian.
Scale this thing 10 times larger, attach a couple of guns, put a soldier in it and you're ready to shoot a lot of sentinels :)
just for your reference.
Japanese Resource for average mass
English translation
# all numbers are killo
Generally,60kg(130lbs)lift strength is not enough for Japanese men.(Good for Japanese women)]
I've been waiting for one of these all my life. It seems like women have finally become obsolete. I just wonder if any of the lab technicians have discovered any of the "alternate" uses for this fantastic robot.
Roujin Z anyone? Better think twice before giving this to the senile elderly.
I think you're missing the point with the carrying robot -- it is biped.
Yes, take a look at that photo again, and count the legs. One, two.
"I believe this biped robot, which I prefer to call a two-legged walking chair rather than a wheelchair, will eventually enable people to go up and down the stairs," said Atsuo Takanishi, from Waseda University.
Sure, it can only carry 60 kg.
Sure, it can only lift it's legs a few millimetres at the moment.
But damn! It's biped and it's capable of carrying a (shifting weight) human in a chair on top!
That's impressive if anything is.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley