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RHex Robot Shows Off Parkour Moves
Zothecula writes "Parkour is all about hurling yourself quickly and efficiently past whatever obstacles are in your path while maintaining as much momentum as possible. It's a challenge for humans, so how would robots fare? In an effort to push the boundaries of robotic agility, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania decided to find out by teaching their RHex robot some Parkour moves."
See the Kod*lab homepage for much, much more on the RHex family.
The robot hardly jumps over anything, and when it jumps onto something it doesn't even keep moving. This robot has as much to do with parkour as a baby takings its first steps has to do with olympic sprinting. Actually that would be more related because at least the baby uses basically the same limbs. So let's say an alien baby. The video left me feeling sad and disappointed, at a lower hedonic level than previously. I cannot conceive why 1300 separate people chose to upvote the video. Unless perhaps they only watched the clip of the robot sprinting into the air. Which was cool the first time. But not the following ten times.
I think it could be the next American Ninja Warrior!
after a jump is to pull yourself up. Without that last step the sequence of moves loses its purpose.
Before you know it one of these things will flip out and we have to send Tom Selleck to try and catch it. The man is 68! He can't go running after robots anymore.
when i read the summary i was thinking of a terminator type robot that could chase down a human (considering most humans aren't strong/fast enough to do parkour)... imagine my disappointment when i clicked the link
Parkour
Parkour is about having a beard, a check shirt and stupid glasses.
Cunts.
The video is pretty poorly done. The editing will make people think they are trying to mislead people. It’s pretty amazing considering how light the robot must be. I was left wondering how it knew the obstacle it was attacking. It didn't have any cameras I could see. They probably had to set it up for each maneuver. It would have been neat to see a sequence of maneuvers performed.
""Parkour is all about _hurting_ yourself quickly and efficiently"...
Was it only I who initially read the first line of the summary as "Parkour is all about *hurting* yourself quickly and efficiently..." ?
When a couple Americans went to Japan to compete on Ninja Warrior, the show included a few clips of them doing Parkour. All I can say is - I wouldn't want to be their insurance company! But some of that is seriously impressive. ... Which is why this robot video was so disappointing. If they hadn't gone out of their way to mention "Parkour" I might've found it cool - but while the robot traveled quickly, other than the backflip (which apparently was some set piece) everything else was mundane. Okay it went up some shallow stairs and slightly uneven ground - I'm not sure that's considered Parkour.
#DeleteChrome
"Parkour is all about hurling yourself quickly and efficiently..."
I think this is more appropriate:
"Parkour is all about hurting yourself quickly and efficiently."
Network of robots doing parkour above our heads with our packages, going straight lines to their destinations over the city, without yelling "parkour!" at random locations.
At first I read: "Parkour is all about hurting yourself quickly and efficiently [...]". :-D
Not sure how far from the truth that would be
I thought parkour was about showing off? Did they make a robot with an ego to stroke?
My guess for robots is that they will end up being insectile in design. Most of the tasks that we will assign them will be more like ants. I have never complete understood the general Japanese direction of attempting humanoid robots. While cool we already have lots of humans. Some might argue that we also have lots of tools designed for people and these would then be available to humanoid robots. But if I wanted a robot to drill holes all day I am pretty sure that I would just design the drill as an a attachment in a multi purpose robot or build it right into a single purpose robot.
Many kudos to the designer of this robot by virtue that a key obstacle to useful robots are obstacles. A great example of terrible locomotion robots would be those bomb disposal robots. They just lumber along looking like they are going to tip and most don't look like they could negotiate a curb and certainly not some stairs.
My only complaint about this innovative robot would be that its nemesis would be dental floss. That badboy would become a tangled mess moments after encountering something like floss.
clearly the poster has no clue what parkour is. It's about artful movement using the obstacles in one's environment. There's nothing artful about that robot. Sure it's cool and neat, but there's no "art" there.
Leave it to the French to invent the sport of running away.
If this were true, then we wouldn't see all these videos of people doing weird 2 handed hops over things that are either not directly in their path or barely thigh high.
Gynastistics/boarding on urban buildings went by other names in the past. In the 1980s we called it buildering.
But can it run Linux? /rimshot
But this robot has about as much to do with Parkour as a Slinky toy.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
This is an exciting leap into the field of hipster robotics.