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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.
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.
No kidding. A random article from 2005
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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.
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