Chairbot Walks You Around While You Sit

Gary writes "What do you get when you combine a robot and a chair? The Hubo FX-1 chairbot, of course. In what is perhaps my favorite robot design yet, this giant chair with legs looks like it came out of some ridiculous 80's sci-fi movie or something, but it's very, very real. HUBO FX-1 is two meters in height, and weighs 150 kg. The person sitting can control the robot easily using the built in joystick. Each ankle has a 3-axis force/torque sensor which measures the normal force and 2 moments. Each foot has an inclination sensor which measures the angle of the slope. Also, the rate gyro and the inclination sensor of the body allow the device to stabilize itself."

Comments

Technical Paper

[morcheeba]

I found this interesting technical paper on the robot: Experimental Realization of Dynamic Walking for a Human-Riding Biped Robot, HUBO FX-1. It has lots of pretty pictures and graphs and gets in to the control-system problems they had when they developed it. Each step runs through three different balance control strategies, which they outline in detail. It's almost enough information to build your own!