One Giant Step for Humanoids

An anonymous reader writes "There are a few robots that do amazing things. Honda's Asimo can walk backward and climb stairs. Sega's idog can dance to music. A tougher nut to crack has been making robots walk like humans. Today, scientists introduce three humanoid striders at the annual AAAS meeting. Unlike other robots that have to power every move, these three save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let 'em drop. Engineers say they'll inform the next generations of humanoids and also improve design of robotic prostheses for people. And hey, why not send them to Mars to look for those microbes?"

Comments

Why not?

[lawpoop]

"And hey, why not send them to Mars to look for those microbes?"

Probably because there are much more efficient ways to locomote. Bipedalism is risky, especially if you want to bend over a lot to pick things up.

I'm in favor of a radially symmetrical spider-like walker that can turn in any direction, or even invert it legs and continue walking if it gets turned upside down. This would make it much more flexible in navigating the Martian environment.

You could have a central ring with legs attatched all around it, and then a rotating body that includes sensors, power supply, and a grappling hand. The single grappling hand descends from the center and pulls samples up into the body for storage/analysis.

Re:Prosthetics

[BWJones]

We scientists are always making stuff the defense department is interested in. You would absolutely be amazed at the possibilities that people think of for basic science research. In fact, I am going to be meeting with a bunch of DOD folks in a couple of months because they are interested in what we are doing. Not everything the DOD does though is involved with taking of life. There is a considerable interest in battlefield medicine and such. At any rate, this is an aspect of the Bush administrations push to applied as opposed to basic research that troubles me. We should not push basic research to the sidelines because that is where advances start from that yes, even the DOD can take advantage of.

Re:Muscles, perhaps?

[cnettel]

Also, remember that a leg is not dropping. I know you indirectly said so by mentioning the energy stores and so on, but I think it's important to make it an explicit point.

We approximate a pendulum rather than letting the foot be some kind of ball attached to a "string" (the leg) bouncing up and down. Human movements without a proper grasp of angular momentum gives strange interpretation, like that of the OP.

Logical conclusion

[EmbeddedJanitor]

We're somewhere along the following evolutionary parth for war:

One king doesn't like the other king so he goes beats him up. Unfortunately he also gets hurt in the process.

Hey instead of **me** being hurt I'll send some blokes (==soldiers) over to beat up the other king.

The other king doesn't like to be beaten up, so he puts his soldiers in the way. We now have two armies beating eachother up.

Hey let's not send our soldiers into the battlefield to get hurt, let's send robots. Nobody gets hurt. Soldiers can sit at home and eat pizza.

The enemy then gets pissed that these robots beat up their people and build their own. Now we have robots beating up on robots.

Next, the one army gets pissed that their robots are getting beaten up and start hacking the enemy comms to stop the other robots. The enemy responds by hacking the hackers...

So what's the logical conclusion? Is war going to just end up being a big computer simulation with nobody getting hurt? Perhaps the kings should just go decide over a nice game of chess!