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Avatar-Style Manned Robot Takes First Steps In South Korea (valuewalk.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ValueWalk: A robot designed by a veteran of science fiction blockbusters which bear a striking resemblance to the military robots seen in the movie Avatar has taken its first baby steps. The robot standing in a room on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea stands four meters (13 feet) tall and weighs 1.5 tons. In a Facebook post, designer Vitaly Bulgarov said, "Everything we have been learning so far on this robot can be applied to solve real-world problems." His previous work experience includes work on film series such as Transformers, Terminator and Robocop, reports phys.org. Its creators at the Hankook Mirae Technology, a robotics company in South Korea, claim it is the world's first. About 30 engineers there worked hard conducting initial tests Tuesday afternoon, notes phys.org. For the engineers, it was a challenge to build the giant robot because the unprecedented scale meant they had nothing to refer to. Company chairman Yang Jin-Ho said, "Our robot is the world's first manned bipedal robot and is built to work in extreme hazardous areas where humans cannot go (unprotected)." A pilot sitting inside the robot's torso made some limb movements, and the robot, Method-2, mimicked them with his metal arms, each weighing 130 kilograms (286 pounds). It is so huge that it is twice the size of a tall man, and when it takes a step, the ground shakes with a loud whirring of motors. Method-2 has grabbed the media's attention due to its enormous size, but its creators say that the core achievement of the project is the technology they developed. How the robot will be used is unclear so far, but it is seen more as a test-bed for various technologies that will make it possible for the creators to build robots of any type and size in the future, notes phys.org.
Try Battletech. Aliens. Titanfall. Starship Troopers (the book).
I am not sure what I'd do with one but I want one :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
This is great. It's not like South Korea has some kind of nut job for a northern neighbor who is going to feel even more diminutive now and be likely to nuke them for just having this.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Who would win three way fight be between MegaBots Inc's Mk. III, Suidobashi Heavy Industry's KURATAS and this.
Bingo. sew up the movie rights. This Thing has Talent!
Reactor Online. Sensors Online. Weapons Online. All Systems Nominal.
http://imgur.com/a/a3do8
The robot is a freagin' joke. This is a publicity stunt. The only way this thing works is with the support crane
The cane is obviously there to stop the dam thing crashing to the ground if it over balances for whatever reason. Even Boston Dynamics does that with their prototypes.
As is it has absolutely ZERO real world application and even less than zero in a combat situation, short of maybe something in a movie.
We need to come up with the robotic equivalent of
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
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It's not supported by a crane, because it's not even real. The video is fake. Just pause the video right at the beginning and you'll see this magical white, oval shape flying in the air above the robot and in front of the cables, like it's supposed to be a part of one of the ceiling-lights and someone deleted the ceiling-light from the 3D-scene before rendering the video, but forgot to also remove its light-source.
Wow the lighting effects are bad
"The video was posted on social media on Sunday by a 3D modelling designer Vitaly Bulgarov, who is involved in the project."
I'm not seeing that. Go full screen and you can see it is link chain, not cable. The part of the chain above the light blocks a view of the upper part of the light fixture, and enough of the light is shining through the chain to mostly wash it out, but it is there. During the first few seconds, the chains swinging makes it a bit hard to focus on, as clean chain is shiny, but you can see the light dimming a bit. At 58 seconds the light fixture comes back into view and it all makes sense.
YMMV.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
robots started walking since the late 1950's, and hows that working out for us, now some jackass makes a knock off from a movie that was a knock off of battletech that takes a step while being held in a harness
clap clap, do something useful!
Walkers are not practical for combat, but there may be a few niches. Cargo handling, for one. Not all cargo comes in convenient containerised forms and with enough space around it for forklifts. Or construction. Or disaster response, excavating collapsed buildings. Basically any time it would be handy for someone to be able to heft half-ton objects around.
YAPWRMU
The poster put 1.5 ton (where "ton" aka 1000kg, or 1Mg if you wanna be a core SI nerd ) from the original article but dumped the 4m heigth to replace it with 13 feet.
WFT
C'm'on, if you realy want to use units that myanmar, liberia and US only still use as legal : do it. But please do not mix them without clarifying which unit you are refering to.
As a reminder "ton" is a coloquial term for lots of things :
- 1,016 kg if in UK and using old mesurements
- 907kg if in US (and to some extend as a legacy in Canada to)
- 1000 kg in the SI for the rest of our universe (until proven wrong)
As the article was using SI units as main unit system only adding some imperial units as explanation for US citizen joes, I was expecting : either a direct quotation with SI units as main and Imperial as explanation (=KISS) or even Imperial as main (long live to the stonecutters, and yes we are on /. dude, I know) and SI as a clarification for the rest of us.
I should point out that this is the prototype for a tracks-and-arms machine intended for ongoing Fukushima clean-up. We can't really ask what they did in Chernobyl - they just sent in unprotected conscripts to clean up - even replace the soviet flag when the radiation bleached it - after which they were either euthanized or tranquilized while the radiation poisoning ran its course. (Though, in the circumstances, it's hard to tell the difference, there) The lucky survived a while without cancer.
These days, though, we have tungsten, boron nitride, and leaded glass. And now we have something else to carry it for us. Which is good, because if this lights a candle under Cyberdyne's butt, they're likely to actually ship product - someone's likely to ship product - before we next need something like this.
Without the uber power supply, this is nothing more than a marketing stunt.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make a human sized (or smaller) robot that can walk first, and then scale it up? If human size robots can't reliably stay balanced, why the fuck would I want to crawl inside one that's as big as a school bus?
To me the video looks fake because of the humans. movements of the humans look more robotic than the robot - head turns are unnaturally linear and stop abruptly, hand movements are a bit uncanny and everyone is apparently Botox-ed up to the max.
In Aliens, the boxes the lifters lifted had lifter bars sticking out from the sides like ears. This is just stupid for packing crates together. Oh they could be removable but then you need a thick socket at least, wasting an inch or more of space on each side, and extra time to attach and detach them.
Stupid all around. Large ones aiding mining and logging might be useful, but that's it. Militarily these are stupid sitting ducks. There's a reason all aliens since War of the Worlds in the 1950s need "force fields" to protect them, because missile tech makes mince meat of any such things.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Those guys right fucking there seem a little too calm for a giant robot right there. Sorry, fake.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.