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Two Legged Robot Sets Speed Record
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in Germany and Scotland have made the fastest two-legged robot yet (for its size) called RunBot. It is controlled by a simple program that mimics the way neurons control reflexes in humans and other animals. From the article: 'We wanted to show that a very simple system with a simple neuronal controller could walk in a natural manner - and fast,' says Florentin Wörgötter, from the University of Göttingen in Germany. The story also features couple of videos of RunBot in action."
How many leg-length per second can the "average" human achieve?
It can walk but can't maintain verticality? Is it there to stabilize it? That's pretty lame if they don't even have to worry about keeping its center of balance
My work here is dung.
Call be back when it's untethered, has arms, and can stand itself back up after it trips. Then I'll be impressed. Until then, it's no more impressive than a bot on wheels.
i think a human-robot team would be more impressive, because you can probablly program a robot to synchronize with another identical robot easier than you can program it to synchronize with a human being.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
And this is what Kevin Kelly says in his excellent book Out of Control (The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World). Start with small and dumb machines, follow nature and gradually build up the complexity. The efforts of creating one machine which does it all is going to fail.
Tell that to the Kangaroos! They have one of the most efficient bidepal locomotion stratagies because as they land they stretch two massive tendons and store all the kinetic energy, which they then use to bounce themselves aloft once more.
From the linked page ...
Running is a strange means of locomotion that involves bouncing up and down, as well as moving forward. This bouncing is aided by the elastic nature of the Achilles tendon at the back of the foot, which acts like an elastic band, stretching when we put our foot down, and then pulling back to its relaxed length to propel us upward. This conserves a considerable amount of energy during running, raising the energy efficiency from 25 to 40 percent or more. And training increases the elasticity of the tendon, whereas aging decreases elasticity, making running less efficient. Kangaroos are the ultimate masters of this pogo stick effect, which enables them to increase from 5 to 20 kilometers per hour without using any extra energy -- just more bounce.
I, for one, welcome our robotic bouncing kangaroo overlords.
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The kangaroos are storing the energy on coming down, and releasing most of it coming back up. A human doesn't have the same kind of mechanical advantage, and relies on muscle power to do the up and down motion. Therefore, it's more efficient for a human to keep vertical motion to a minimum so that the majority of the energy can be devoted to forward locomotion. The achilles tendon does help with humans, but it's not to the same extent as in kangaroos. Besides, if you watch a kangaroo when it's just moving at a good clip across open ground, their bodies and centers of mass actually don't move vertically very much, it's just their legs.
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