Slashdot Mirror
Build a Robot out of a Car?
SomeRobotGuy writes "A researcher in the U.K. is in the process of building an autonomous biped robot out of a Mini Cooper r50. Its functions are controlled by six computers running RTLinux and it's powered by an internal combustion engine. And the thing's not tiny, at over 10 feet tall! The site includes videos showing some impressive results."
The site is well camouflaged to make it seem real. The CG work is well done. It wouldn't suprise me if this is a site created by MINI. They have a long history of non-traditional advertising. They have put a MINI in the stands at a Giants Baseball game. They put them into Malls on a platform with coin slots saying $16,995 in quaters for a ride.
There best known one was putting the MINI on the roof of a Chevy Suburban and driving it arround San Francisco.
It was also recently revealed that the Weekly World News article with BatBoy Stealing a MINI was a planted article by MINI USA.
This thing looks like a cross between a Gundam and Robocop. I think that Jesse James should have built this on Monster Garage. OK. Now what does it REALLY do?
I wonder if perhaps that's a sign that the small hobbyist sites are the only ones doing "cool" stuff anymore.
There is nothing but fluff on that site. The "sketches" have the stink of marketing all over them. Now, whenever I see a Mini Cooper, I'll be reminded of their pathetic "me too" attempt to get some attention. At least Honda's Cog ad actually entailed some technological brilliance and real work to make happen. All this does is raise the question of where the line should be drawn when it comes to making false claims of research and development in order to get free advertising. Isn't that illegal? What's the difference between what Mini is doing and what we'd think of a drug company that fabricated a bunch of bogus "technology" to imply that it had a cure for cancer for the purpose of getting free advertising?
Yeah, I guess I don't like the feeling of being duped by a marketing department.
The /. effect got to the page before I did... But I wonder if the robot looks something like this:
m pg
http://home.comcast.net/~themichaelsmith/VWHiRes.
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Free advertising here on Slashdot.
Cheers
VikingBrad
One thing I just noticed--the robot's shadow is directly opposite to that of the cones/car.
I don't use Emacs; it uses me.
Gah, you gotta be kidding me. Back when I was playing MW2: Mercenaries, the most godlike mech I ever used was a DC Urbanmech named Lucifer. (yes, the beer-keg on legs)
It had maxed out jump-jets, twelve medium lasers, and maxed heat sinks. Its only other weapon was a machinegun in the head with one ton of ammo, for taking out Elementals and such.
All the lasers were in either the left or right torso, where those arms would shield all of the hits. All the beams would fire at the same time, and hit the same place.
There is nothing like oneshotting an Atlas. Period. Especially when you horizontal-jet in a la Gundam to do so with a glorified beam-saber.
And being in an UrbanMech, I was always ignored until big things started dying.
Don't tell me that it was cheap, I know it was.
(12*6=72 damage, way more than any PPC)
You know, you'd think after all these years someone would make an update to Apache which would basically amount to a "Protect Against SlashDot Effect" checkbox. If more than ten megs move out over the course of ten seconds (a minute, hundred megs, whatever works best, this is just an arbritary set of example numbers), the site CLOSES temporarily. Just a blank page, or a user-defined page. "Sorry, we're slashdotted, come back later. Link : What is 'slashdotted'. Click to find out ", or something of the sort.
Of course, in a perfect world all movie links would be torrent files seeded by the server at a max speed of 10k/sec.
Have you guys heard of "Stealth Marketing"? 60 Minutes covered it a few months back, but basically, imagine this scenario.
You're walking down times square, and a pretty couple with exotic accents, who look and act like tourists asks you to take their photo. They hand you their digital camera. You notice it's one you've never seen or heard of before, so you snap the photo, and then ask about it, and they proceed to tell you how cool this camera is.
You've just been 'Stealth Marketed' -- the tourists are fake, actors hired to stand in Times Square asking people to take their photo.
You're sitting in Starbucks and you see a guy playing a cool game on his laptop. Pretty soon, he's letting you try the game and you're hooked. Turns out he's also an actor hired to sit in the coffee shop and get people to try the game.
This looks to me like a Stealth Marketing campaign diliberately directed at the Slashdot crowd. Note the post came from "SomeRobotGuy", who, I'll bet, is also in on this gag.
The server was supposed to get slashdotted to hell and not work properly, as that lends an air of credibility to the hack.
You're all part of a campaign directed at people like us who read Slashdot, ArsTechnica, HardOCP, and Wired. Chances are this site will make the rounds on all the hardcore tech sites, and if it makes a few people consider buying a Mini-Cooper, then the Stealth Marketing guys have done their job.
Believe me, this won't be the last time you're "hacked" by Marketing types who are getting more clever about how to direct an advertising campaign at you without you even realising you're being advertised to.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
A 1500 lb anything is not going to be particularly quiet when it's moving... heck, I have a cat that makes more noise than that thing does.
This is about as real as a 9 dollar bill.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Also listen to the interview- especially the "leg is a pendulum, so we used a fly-wheel" crap. I have some (limited) experience with humanoid-type robotics, but this guy straight BS'es through both interviews. its pretty amusing through.
The difference in shadow casting between the two objects, when they are both at roughly the same location, is so dramatic that it could not possibly be anything but a hoax.
I had a really long post that I was going to type about disproving the "robot stopping the jeep" through some ideal physics calculations, but my computer locked up on me (and I was lacking an initial velocity value for the Jeep). However, if anyone's a Physics guru and wants to give it a go, I compiled some initial data for it:
Weight of Jeep: ~1800kg.
Weight of Robot (assuming it's still about the same weight as the car it was made from): ~1483kg.
Coefficient of Friction for Car on pavement:
Coefficient of Friction for robot on pavement: ???
(Anyone know the M
Time before stop: ~1.5sec
So what we'd really need is the coeff. of Kinetic Friction for metal on pavement, the initial velocity of the Jeep, and... can't think of anything else. We could then figure out the force, under ideal conditions, that the robot must have been under. My wager is that the force would be significant. But the light difference, as shown in the video linked to above, is proof enough I think. I'll believe the Robot story when I physically touch the thing.
-Vendal Thornheart
Simple scaling laws that should be known by any engineer tell why bipeds of that size are not a good idea to begin with.
With increasing size the time constant of motion changes (froude number) making larger robots inherently slower. Also other laws indicate that the influence of gravition grows larger, make the robot difficult to control and prone to damage.
There are reasons why nature has not created bipeds of that size.
bad form to reply to self, etc etc, but just wanted to put the final nail into this coffin (err....):
"The gyros are polled at 100Hz, which is overkill considering the height of the robot's CG. With six gyros churning at 100hz, a lot of mission-critical bandwidth is required, so I placed the gyros on their own token-ring controller that is accessible only to the balance and watchdog CPUs. "
100hz is SLOW for low-level feedback control. we run 4-wheel omni-dir robots and they go at 300 hz... i would think that you need an even higher control frequency (and lots of sensors/fast actuators!) when you're balancing a humanoid.
the robots center of gravity has nothing to do with this. also you would probably have more than 6 gyros for this many limbs... and you'd also have accelerometers, etc. a token ring has NOTHING to do we gyro/accel-type sensors. in fact all a gyro/acc requires for output is usually a single wire connection (analog or duty cycle output)
also, humanoids are REALLY difficult to keep balanced, not even speaking of through doing some actions (stopping cars?????). oh yeah, and motors with torque high enough to actually support that thing either a) don't exist or b) are too slow or c) REALLY expensive. take a look at the sony SDR-4X robot ( i think it got renamed recently) and its joints. compare to Honda's ASIMO thats a few years older. etc etc...
It's a bit bizarre that you can't see any webpages, but you can still download the movie files using direct links.