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Balancing Robot Can Take a Kicking
BotKicker writes "A Japanese team has created the first full-size humanoid robot that won't fall over if you push it. A video shows it staggering and regaining balance after blows from a researcher. Being able to withstand shoves and kicks is essential if robots are to truly be our buddies, they reckon. 'The robot's balancing ability depends on its joints. For one thing they are never kept rigid, even when standing still, meaning they yield slightly when the robot is pushed. Force sensors within each joint also work out the position and velocity of the robot's centre mass as it moves around. Control software rapidly figures out what forces the robot's feet need to exert on the ground to bring it back into balance, and tells the joints how to act.'"
What about a roundhouse kick?
That video will probably be one of the first exhibits in the Case for the Robot Uprising. As you can clearly see, not only did humans from the beginning view robots as being menial servants that we can push around and bully, we actually engineered them so that we could shove and kick them at will without interfering with their service of us! They're designed to be abused!
In an cruel twist, it is this same ability that will make our punches and kicks ineffectual for defending our fleshy bodies from the robots when they turn against us.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'd say the major stereotypical problems with robots in the past is that they might go beserk and kill people.
> perform tasks like bend over and pick up weighty objects
A robot should not bend over and pick up weighty objects. It should squat and pick it up while maintaining it s rear electrical conduit in a straight configuration to prevent getting a herniated servo in the back.
Evil people are out to get you.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I recently met an MS sufferer that has been completely confined to a wheelchair for years because the nerves in her legs don't fire properly, even though she has sensation and can tell when she is not balanced.
So take this so called "robot" technology, and make it something that becomes sort of like a small exo-skeletal muscle system. Call it robotically controlled balance assistance, or whatever you want.
End result, she's out of the chair. In the real world. Good, no?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...