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Swinging Robot Excels At Wall-Climbing
Zothecula writes "Engineers have used a variety of techniques to create robots that can scale walls — the Climber uses a rolling seal, while the insect-like robots from SRI have caterpillar tracks with electro-adhesive properties. While such robots generally focus on speed, adhering to the wall and deciding how and when to move, the creators of a small robot named ROCR say it is the first wall-climbing robot to focus on climbing efficiently. And it does so by using the momentum of a tail that swings like a grandfather clock's pendulum."
Pardon my Latin (I actually don't know any). Anyway, those of you familiar with Ray Kurzweil's writings know well his predictions of when robots (A.I.) will surpass then vastly outperform humans in intellectual powers.
Well here's something that people may have overlooked. Robots may well surpass us sooner (a lot sooner?) in physical tasks. There was a demo of a small UAV that could fly up and "stick" to a wall using a maneuver impossible for a human controller to emulate (this is not the same as the MIT UAVs that can perch). Also, there were the Stanford (?) micro-helicopters which "learned" acrobatic stunts from their controllers and surpassed them. I heard of a unmanned car that could perform on of those crazy slide sideways into a parking space maneuvers. And then of course there is "Big Dog" which can take a flying kick and keep walking.
It is interesting that most sci-fi movies portray robots as powerful, even indestructible but slow and sometimes clumsy. I can think of only one movie where they had a robot that was clearly Man's physical (as well as mental) superior ; the panther like military robot in "Red Planet". It stalked and "played" with its human prey, wounding but not killing in order to slow the group down (I seem to remember).
Of course what's really going on is that this is just a side effect of Kurzweil's predictions. Motors and metals aren't getting much better but the processors and algorithms that run on them are. A good example might be from one of William Gibson's novels where ordinary drones and shrubbery sheering robots become tools of murder in the hands of the A.I.
I no longer login because I feel that while attacking a company's products is fair game (specifically Apple), having stories singling out their users as "selfish" and unkind is not "news for nerds stuff that matters". Am I an Apple fanboi? Let's just say I've used NIX for decades (yes I'm old) and I'm not talking OS X.
Your wife? Of course not. You might want to hide your smoke detectors though.
Gibbon monkeys are probably the fastest climbers, and they keep their momentum by swinging their bodies around their wrists that have ball and socket joints. This robot uses a similar principle.