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Toyota Reveals A Humanoid Robot That Can Run
Peter writes "Toyota researchers have unveiled a new humanoid robot that can run at 7 km/h, which is faster than Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO. Toyota's robot can also keep itself balanced when pushed, as shown in the video."
i, for one, welcome our robot ninja overlords. But seriously, robots are evolving quick in dextety these days
Nike had better sign that sucker up, pronto!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'm American! I have no idea if that is fast or not! Someone help me, do I need to be afraid or can I outrun it? Even if it's slow, I probably can't outrun it.
It looks to me like their is something below the foot that makes contact before the white part of the foot makes contact. From the high speed camera, it looks like this make contact on the front foot before the back foot leaves the ground. I thought to be running, both feet need to be in the air at once. Otherwise you were walking. Maybe I am just seeing the video wrong? Regardless, it looks very impressive.
to an all-robot World Cup team.
Minus Zidane.
...does it run linux?
THL phish sticks
If you're looking for a long (LONG) term investment, Toyota seems the way to go.
Oh yeah? Well, just wait to see what GM's response to these robots will be!
Once the robots have eliminated all their human creators, the world-wide war will be Honda vs Toyota.
Sadly, the goal of the war will be to eliminate all commercial competition for the car divisions of Honda and Toyota but there will be no humans left to buy them.
And like a house of cards, it's going to be checkmate right in the bullseye.
If you can cram it in a locker maybe geeks can give phys ed bullies a substitute to abuse.
ideopath @ play
Why are all of these robots configured to work in a squatting position? Is it that much more difficult to make them perform in a fully upright human like stance?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There's not much of a moment of suspension, but there is some. There's a little more than with Research ASIMO.
Most legged running researchers are trying to maintain some stability criterion, and avoid spending much time in suspension, with all legs off the ground. This may be the wrong approach.
There are two schools of thought in this field. There are the people who start with walking and try to work up to running, and the people who start with hopping and try to work down to running. Most work is from the first school, but BigDog comes from the hopping faction.
Suspension is sometimes a good way to get out of trouble. You get to move all the limbs while in flight and get completely new footholds. Watch some basketball and you'll see this frequently. There's also a half-suspension in quadrupeds, as when you see a horse kick up their hind end to reposition the legs.
The technology in this area can get much, much better. The hardware, in robots, sensors, and computers, is almost good enough. Now we need smarter control algorithms.
"Life is like a box of screws", it commented
The only way bipeds can walk or run efficiently (ie not complete drain all their power moving their legs) is if they store energy in their spine, this little fellow probably loses all the energy it takes to move without storing any of it for the next step. I guess we'll just have to wait for those CNT muscles.
I don't get it. While impressive and cool-looking in itself, it's obvious that the robot misses a host of methods the human body can employ to move gracefully and efficiently on two legs. I'd suggest developers of humanoid robots try to understand how humans do it. Research into martial arts should teach them a thing or two, T'ai-Chi Ch'uan should work especially well.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I expect my next Toyota truck to turn into a Transformer robot whenever some idiot cuts in front of me on the road.
Just don't let it try to run up the stairs.
Screw the 3 laws! If a robot is pushed it should have the right to push back!
If they can get two of these robots doing the rumba or the foxtrot, then I would be impressed.
...who is totally, utterly impressed by the sight of this set of mechanical parts actually running? Watching the video I have forgotten that this is all a mass of composite and metal. All those SF movies and animations where robots are depicted as slowly-moving objects have been obsoleted in one instant. If anything, it's time for some rather more terrifying robotic characters.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Unless you were joking, back to Physics 101, please. Conversion between units of speed is in no way dependent on temperature or anything else but the base units of distance and time. You're converting, remember?
I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. What would truly be a giant step for robots and AI is to build a robot that can learn to crawl like a baby, and then walk, go up and down the stairs, run and eventually drive a cab around New York city.
If your robot can do that, then you're the man and everybody will flock around from distant lands to worship at your feet and kiss your ass.
He's converting Kelvin-meters per hour.
Why doesn't it just sit and drive a Toyota????
I so look forward to the day I'm no longer tasked with the tedium of driving a car.
Hope is the currency of fools
"In the salt-belt of America our cars rust in a little as 4 years and look terrible. Then we have the crummy wiring systems that make the electrical un-reliable after 5 years."
You couldn't afford a salt-proof car,
Salt on road or long car life, choose one.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Ok, I give myself a little woosh here. A "wsh", so to speak. I think that's punishment enough.
To run smoothly and efficiently robots will need joint motors that are springy and compliant just like human muscles.
I tend to agree. What you want to emulate a muscle is a spring with a variable spring constant and zero position. There are several ways to do that. A double-ended pneumatic cylinder can do it; if you pressurize both ends at a high pressure, it's stiff, and if you pressurize both ends at low pressure, it's springy. Relative differences in pressure change the zero position. If the valves are close to the cylinder, position control of pneumatic cylinders works. Someone at CWRU built a robot this way. Of course, you need an onboard air compressor.
There's a new variation on this concept - a device which is both a pneumatic cylinder and a linear motor. A pneumatic cylinder is a piston in a tube, and a linear motor is a magnet in a tube with coils outside the tube. So a device can be built which has a magnet as the piston and coils outside the tube, allowing both pneumatic and electrical operation. The linear motor does the fine positioning and the pneumatic system provides high power when needed.
It's possible to do an adjustable spring mechanically, using two actuators pulling on opposed springs. That's been tried, but most of the designs involve pulleys and strings, which tend to be troublesome. I've been working on a new string-less mechanical design in that area, one that can fit inside the space required for an R/C servo of the type used on hobbyist robots.
BigDog is hydraulic, and its actuators are very stiff. They had to put a bicycle shock absorber at the end of each leg to handle the landing shocks. But BigDog doesn't recover significant running energy. The Legged Squad Support System, the militarized successor to BigDog, may have energy recovery. There are things one can do with hydraulic accumulators and extra valves to get spring-like behavior out of hydraulics. Still, BigDog does a nice job; energy recovery will improve gas mileage, not stability.
There's also a way to fake spring-like behavior, using a "series elastic actuator". This is a leadscrew-type linear actuator in series with a stiff spring. When the spring is compressed, the drive motor frantically tries to release the pressure before the spring bottoms out. This doesn't really store much energy, but it can be used to fake something that does. Pratt at MIT came up with this, and it's a useful research tool.
There have been a number of other, more exotic muscle-line actuators, including fluids that change properties in an electric field, but so far, they're all worse than the ones mentioned above.
One would assume that it's not unreasonably hard to start from walking and move to running.
Yes, one would assume that. And one would be wrong.
People have been studying locomotion for centuries. Until the 1980s, almost everyone obsessed on gait issue. There's an extensive literature on stride length, footfall pattern, and similar gait issues. Most locomotion studies focused on straight-line movement, too.
The real issue is handling the hard cases - slipping, tripping, hills, finding footholds. That's what legs are for. (On flat ground, wheels are easier and better. There is no point making legged machines which can only handle flat ground.) Legs are assets to be deployed as necessary to get first traction, then balance, then propulsion. Gaits are an emergent behavior of that process.
Kids these days. Carbon nanotube this, carbon nanotube that. What's wrong with ye olde goode carbon STEEL? Last time I checked, springs can store mechanical energy!
Impressive. I have to keep reminding my self that the little one to the left is not a human, and keeps looking for evidence to that.
Wounder when we can expect the robot to do karate, that would really be a masterpiece of balance act!
My mind spins to mr R. Daneel Olivaw....
like xenophobia? maybe i'm biased (being an american), but i prefer the straightforward "we're building robots to kill you if you try to hurt us (or our oil)" to "we're building robots to take care of our aging population because we're racist and don't trust foreigners"...
I think I've seen this one run when I was visiting the institute in 2000 or 2001:
http://www.irt.uni-hannover.de/irt/asr/bart_alt-en.html
There's not much of a moment of suspension, but there is some. There's a little more than with Research ASIMO.
Perhaps a poor pun, but you forget that ASIMO has been running now for at least 5 years. Back in 2005, my girlfriend and i watched the run demonstration on one of Honda's world trips. The literature at the event pointed out that the robot had been running (both feet off the ground) for at least a year prior to that event.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtiCHtHxc48
One should also not forget that the ASIMO project is growing in multiple areas of robotics, including but not limited to face recognition and learning to interact with the 3D world. Fragments of this can be seen in the show "James May's Big Ideas" (BBC).
Good effort from Toyota and i hope their robotics project continues to get funding.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
I'd be very scared. Meet your replacement!
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
omfg.
If the US and UK didn't waste half as much on military, then the rest of the world would sigh in relief and spend less as well. Don't forget that its the US that is getting into wars every few years, and spends as much on the military as the rest of the planet. Way to go peacekeepers! I think we'd all be better off *without* your guns.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Call me when he can dance like the gay Tin-Man in Wizard of Oz. Oh and blow smoke out his head.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Did you really just call them "the Japs"? Were you being deliberately derogatory or are you just that ignorant?
for some reason this scares me when thinking of the possibilities...
Bring on the running cars! That's the logical end-point for Toyota right? Should be really easy to parallel park. Movie chase scenes set in Europe bouncing down long flights of stairs? Gone. Monster trucks? Bigfoot really will be. Snowshoes: think about it. That's progress, baby!
Sweet!
The first thing that popped into my mind halfway thru was "is it true running or just fast walking?" The closeup at the end shows the former, as both feet are, in fact, off the ground for a short while.
20 years ago some US researchers had a 1-legged robot that could hop and keep its balance, even when pushed pretty hard. The trouble was extending that to two or four feet. This robot gets around that by seeming to hop from one foot to the other in a continuous hopping.
I also note that when pushed backwards, it raises its arms a little to help maintain balance. It isn't only legwork.
Well done!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is a very interesting video, but I'd like more technical details. I'd really like to know how it works to keep its balance. I'd really like to know how many gyros it takes to locate the balance when the upper body is rotating. Can anyone direct me to other sources?
Thanks.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"