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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."
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.
It's about 4.4 MPH, or perhaps more usefully, a 13 minute, 40 second mile. Even us lazy nerds should be able to out-run that.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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 need to be afraid or can I outrun it?
No, because you are an American.
A single 357 magnum round to just about any part of this thing will have it crashing to the ground. These things are way more fragile than a biker on PCP.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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 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.
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.