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Experimenting With Robotic Movement
kodiaktau writes "Roboticists with EPFL are playing with new methods of locomotion for robots, modeled after grasshoppers, bats and other non-traditional forms of movement, including leaping and gliding."
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Looks more like jumpcrashing to me.
That is all.
"... modeled after grasshoppers, bats and other non-traditional forms of movement, including leaping and gliding."
I suspect that grasshoppers and bats might find these forms of movement to be pretty traditional indeed.
I think some of these inventors play too many computer games.
I for one welcome our new jump gliding robotic overlords.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Armed military robots bunny hopping and dolphin diving over a battlefield.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Armed military robots bunny hopping and dolphin diving over a battlefield.
Check out the Precision Urban Hopper from Boston Dynamics. This is a successor to a White Sands project for mobile land mines. Those were spheres with a fuel-powered piston that could launch them a few meters. This is a wheeled vehicle which can jump, but crash lands, which it can tolerate.
The theory of jumping locomotion is interesting, and I once did some work on that in the mid 1990s. (See the kangaroo at the end.) Most locomotion is treated as maintaining some kind of stability, but that won't handle jumps. Jumps can be treated as a two-point boundary value problem. You pick the desired landing point and stance, then work backwards from that. It's rocket science - how, with only the ability to accelerate in one direction, some ability to change attitude over time, and the restriction that you spend most of the time unpowered, you get to a desired position, velocity, and time point. This is good, because rocket science is a well understood problem.
The people doing aggressive maneuvers with model helicopters and quadrotors do that kind of analysis, but it hasn't filtered down to legged robots much as yet. It should.
Sort of like a bird with broken legs.
After viewing the youtube clip my first reaction was that it would have been useful if the feedback sensors would be mounted on the craft. Possibly on the next prototype? Maybe the kids doing the project should ask their mentors about the mechanics of a Polaroid Land Camera. Then come back and demo their craftsmanship in the field of work that their journeymanship will be in. All in all, a nice demo.
This post has been up for hours, and there are 17 comments. Robotics is so dead it isn't funny. Reminds me of AI in the 80's - it's taken 30 years for it to make some comeback. Same thing will happen in robotics. Check back in 25 years. The processing power just isn't there at the moment. And yes it takes a ton of processing power to do anything useful with 3D images - like reacting fast enough and in a way that doesn't kill humans. Plenty of toys at the moment following black lines on the floor, but until we can process images quickly, robotics isn't going anywhere. It will be stuck in university research for many years. BTW, researching nature IS probably a good idea - and when a 1/4 lb computer can process as well as a grasshopper we might be making progress. We can't even do it with a 1 ton computer at this time.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
They probably recorded it 51 times to get the one time it didn't flip itself over.