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Robot Walks Like a Human, Requires No Power
MrSeb writes "Today's groundbreaking entry into the Uncanny Valley is a pair of mechanical, robot legs that are propelled entirely by their own weight: they can walk with a human-like gait without motors or external control. Produced by some researchers at Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan, all the legs require for sustained motion (they walked 100,000 steps, 15km, over 13 hours last year) is a gentle push and a slight downwards slope. They then use same 'principle of falling' that governs human walking, with the transfer of weight (and the slight pull of gravity), pulling the robot into consecutive steps."
Oh wait - small caveat - requires a downhill slope. In the next article we will discover that scientists create a ball that also rolls downhill forever without a power source. OK, maybe it's a feat of balance and engineering but come on...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Actually the human part has more to do with the way we're wired and with one side being more dominant than the other (and thus having both faster nerve conduction and stronger muscles than the other side), than actual engineering. You could build a perfectly symmetrical object and I guess the only things that would knock it off course are wind, thermal effects and the Coriolis effect. You can't build a perfectly symmetrical human though.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It does require power, namely gravitational energy.
-- Cheers!
The article (and you) are implying that adding power (even internal) defeats much of the purpose, and puts us into BIGDOG or ALPHADOG type territory; would there not still be a large efficiency gain over traditional walking robots, such that an internal power source is much more feasible than it would otherwise have been?
I've seen this kind of design before. In fact, you can make it yourself: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Build-A-Walking-Robot---Passive-Walker/
Some other prior art: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/shc17/Passive_Robot/PassiveRobot_photos.htm
Obviously this is probably much better in certain ways but it's tough to call this thing groundbreaking
Stop calling these robots! Do you call Newton's Cradle a robot as well? What about the Drinking Bird or even the common Slinky? Just b/c it has a shape that is in two pieces like a leg does not a robot make, esp one that relies on gravity to perform any motion.
This is old news.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
No kidding. A random article from 2005
....
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050217_robotfrm.htm
But researchers at Cornell University in New York State, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Holland’s Delft University of Technology have built robots that seem to more closely mimic the human gait -- and the Cornell robot matches human efficiency, their designers say. The researchers’ inspiration: simple walking toys that fascinated children in the 19th century.
Researchers at each of the three universities have built walking robots, differing slightly but based on the same principle. They are an extension of several years of research into “passive-dynamic walkers” that walk down a shallow slope, very much like simple walking toys that have been around since the 1800s and developed more scientifically starting in 1988.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
AHA! I have found the plot for my great sci fi novel.
Alien robots land on mountain tops all around the world... they start marching down- destroying all life as we know it- they appear indestructible- mankind is doomed...
Until mankind discovers their fatal flaw... they can only walk downhill.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So, I'm the first to call out academic research as pointless. But I don't think this is.
Imagine two methods of moving an object back and forth.
The first is a playground swing. It can't power itself, but, by kicking it occasionally, you can get it to start swinging, and, once you do, you only need to put in a little extra power to keep that going.
The second is a little cart with powered wheels. It can drive forwards and backwards, and there's nothing to stop you from just driving it rapidly forwards and backwards over and over.
Which is more efficient?
The idea, making an analogy, is that a leg design like this is to walking, as a playground swing is to moving an object back and forth. One way to pump in energy is to make it walk downhill. But another would be to start adding some self-powering capability. I agree with you insofar as I would like to see that happen. Where we disagree, I think, is just in that I'm not dismissing the passive, mechanical side of the work, because I think it's an important part of making that happen.
I'll also acknowledge that passive walkers are not themselves new. But this is one of the better-executed ones I've seen.
No, the evidence from the Mythbusters showed that we wander in either direction. No consistency.
They were convinced they were on track to their target the whole time, but somtimes went left, sometimes went right, sometimes both, sometimes making loops only a few meters in diameter.
Fact is, without eyes or ears, we don't know we're veering from a straight path.
Which makes a lot of sense, looking at it now.
No, the evidence from the Mythbusters showed that we wander in either direction. No consistency.
During the Mythbusters experiment, they also showed them stating multiple times that they had the feeling they might be drifting slightly in a particular direction (even when this was not the case) -- Just 'compensating' for that feeling (whether consciously or not) would explain the seeming randomness to their wanderings.
Come on now, it is not that brilliant??
I have heard of reinventing the wheel (around 9000bc) but this is ridiculous?
We are reinventing walking now?! (200,000BC)
(Can I take my tongue out of my cheek?)
To accommodate all the variety of our environment, we've evolved many degrees of freedom in our foot, ankle, pelvis, etc. So, if we want a robot that can do the same degrees of tasks as us, we need to add back those degrees of freedom to this robot, which in turn will make it fall over, thus defeating its purpose.
The point of the robot is to develop low-energy gaits similar to those that humans use. They can add the extra stuff back in and still maintain the same gaits. Why would it fall over? We don't.