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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'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.
...does it run linux?
No, it just runs. In Soviet Russia, Linux-running overlord, for one, welcomes you?
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.
Only sad part is that in Japan those are evolving for peaceful reasons whereas in USofA for military purposes. Check recent stories about exoskeletons before you mod me down as flamebait...
Sad as cooperation for peaceful purposes would make world a much better place, and military one, no comments. Recently they started testing some of airborne droids to shot on meat targets without human interaction. Sad where all this is going...
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Depends on if you're investing for dollars or inventions, I suppose. I think Toyota has a good research program, and there's a good chance that long-term more exciting things will come out of it. But it's a totally different question whether this will result in Toyota stock being worth significantly more. They could totally implode in the medium-term if their actual business (selling cars) does badly, for example. Or they could fail to figure out how to commercialize the technology, Xerox PARC style. Etc.
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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?
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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
Not necessarily, it could also be seen as, the USA (and others) are creating robots that are already against us, whereas Japan (and others) are creating ones that will eventually turn against us.
What better way to do? Get one of these helper bots in every home, on every street corner, flip the switch and they all take over without any loss of (your, the conquering) lives. Not that I'm saying that's what they are doing, but simply because these appear benign, doesn't necessarily mean that's the ultimate goal, although I do like to think they are to remain harmless, "here to do good thing" robots, as the Japanese have generally always done with them, from Karakuri Ningyo's brining tea, to these.
oh i think they have a firm plan for commercialize this, btw. Japan's population is growing ever older (as is the rest of the developed world, as more people push education and career before family, and have smaller families when they finally get round to it), and have a very xenophobic outlook (tho the samurai of old benefited from from immigrant workers, said workers where seen as lower then the lowest nipponese, and the descendants from said workers may well find themselves discriminated against to this day).
As such, these robots are seen as a technological solution to the workforce erosion, taking on menial and hazardous tasks, without having to reevaluate their views on the outside world.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Ah yeah, I had forgotten about that angle. It's an interesting viewpoint--- I can't find the link again, but I recall reading a study that found that the idea of robots taking care of old people was viewed as a dystopian possibility in the U.S., but a utopian one in Japan.
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But I thought the Japanese invented Gundam Suits and various Mech armors like that.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
I've heard it's due to demographic pressure and xenophobia. The Japanese birthrate is declining and they don't like foreigners. With fewer workers and no outside source they have to increasingly mechanize their factories.
The answer is simple then.
If they are xenophobic, and their population is aging, wait for them to die out enough and then they will have little choice but to integrate with the Collective ... urrhh or maybe just be forced to accept outside help.
Globalisation is a force that can now only be stopped by the scarcity of fuel for global travel. Deal with it. Forget race because we're all humans.
If you had as few degrees of joint freedom as this robot, you wouldn't look too graceful and efficient either...
The Japanese auto manufacturers are simply structured differently than most North American or European ones. Where GM/Chrysler/Ford/BMW/Daimler/Peugeot/VAG/etc. focus entirely on vehicles and their various parts, most of the Japanese auto makers are actually a part of much larger umbrella groups that have all kinds of strange subsidiaries. Aerospace and robotics are two common ones, but the Mitsubishi and Nissan groups tackle all sorts of things from plastics, rubbers, chemicals, to electronics, mining, banking, and insurance.
"Only sad part is that in Japan those are evolving for peaceful reasons whereas in USofA for military purposes. "
Japan thrives under the US conventional and nuclear military umbrella, hosts large US forces, and benefits from US militarism while maintaining a peaceful image of moral superiority. The Japanese military itself is rather impressive, but discreet.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Although (to reply to my own post), an interesting study [PDF] I ran across while looking for that other one suggests American attitudes towards robot employees are warming up in some areas:
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If your definition of invention is 'to wrrite science fiction stories', then yes.
The GP forgets, too, that for all of known history peace has been held by the hands of a ruthless, iron-fisted dictator.
And, as far as military dictators go, the USA is a teddy bear.
I recently watched Gundam Wing again, and even in a cartoon series, some of the characters make extensive speeches about how robot war desensitizes humanity and is therefore wrong. War should be fought by people so that they can understand its terrible cost and will work to oppose and end it.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
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.
But I thought the Japanese invented Gundam Suits and various Mech armors like that.
Incorrect. The first "mobile armor" suit I'm aware of was conceived in Starship Troopers, which won the Hugo Award in 1950. Gundam didn't come about until 1979, and Mechs (as in, BattleMechs) did not come about until the 1980s, and were derived from the Japanese mecha. The first instance of "mecha" I could find was in 1956, which could certainly have originated from Heinlein's work. (That said, ideas tend to occur in spurts, and the 1950s was a pretty big time for the relatively-new powerful mechanized, hydraulically augmented machines of the day. Mecha and Mobile Armor could easily have started independently, though they have undeniably impacted each other since.)
Though I can see why you'd think the Japs would be the origin for such things. I mean, they were the ones who had shoguns and samauri, which are about as close to such things in a pre-industry world as you can get. And they were certainly the only ones to ever have to deal with Godzilla and the like: that kind of exposure could certainly influence a people's mindset! :P
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Only sad part is that in Japan those are evolving for peaceful reasons whereas in USofA for military purposes. Check recent stories about exoskeletons [...]
I've only seen one story about robotic exoskeletons, and it was to help people carry loads beyond their normal abilities. And therefore about as "sad" as power-assisted steering in a car.
I also saw the story of the robot looking like a hot Asian babe. So maybe what's actually sad is not your par-for-Slashdot hippie assumptions, but that here robots are evolving to helping people by becoming extensions of themselves, whereas there they're evolving towards separate entities for sexual gratification and fake companionship.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Humans have to take the risk of dying to make them avoid violence. If they do not run the risk, it is easier to inflict violence on others. It is philosophically easier to kill with a gun than with a knife, because you are removed from the real physical act. A robot can kill on your behalf without you being on the same continent. How does that reduce the tendency for violence ?
Either you are against violence or you're not - which is it ? People shouldn't have to die at all. Making machines do your dirty work does nothing to alleviate suffering from war. Making people actually do the work themselves changes the risk analysis and helps prevent unnecessary bloodshed.
Do you understand the concept of a fair fight ?
This proves you don't understand what's been said.
So it's ok if the humans lives are lost only on the opposing side ? What if you're the aggressor ? What if both sides have robots ? If one side is defeated, what happens then ? Are these military robots going to run the occupation government, or just slaughter all humans ?
If there is no risk to your human forces in a war, there is no reason to avoid war. Do you think nuclear weapons have been unused for a half century because they save lives of your country men, or because their use is unconscionable and would result in massive civilian death on both sides ?
War is not a game, and making it into one does not solve any problems. If your country was invaded how do you fight back ? Do you set aside a field where your countrys force of 1000 robots does battle with the invaders 100,000 robots ? You will lose, and you have still been invaded. What you really do is fight a guerilla action and make it so expensive in lives and equipment that the invader has to withdraw. Have Afghanistan/Korea/Vietnam taught you nothing ? Or do you look forward to a Terminator type existence where you spend your life running and hiding from machines ? Last I heard, Al Quaida has no regular army, air force, ICBMs or the like but they sure made the US pucker its ass. Less than 20 people made the world flinch. Try defending against that with robots. I'm pretty sure that if the US invaded a country by using robots, you would get more of the same. There is nothing worse than a bully who refuses to meet you and fight on equal terms. Far from removing the human consequences, you would ensure that you were sought out and destroyed as punishment for your disrespect and cowardice.
You appear to be comfortable with the notion of sitting on your fat ass in the basement watching family guy and eating cheetos while a scene from the Terminator is played out in a foreign country, in an action run by your government on your behalf. Beware, what goes around, comes around.
6) The only way to win is not to play.
How else do you motivate a lazy robot to run?
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