Walking on Two Legs
Not all ancient reptiles were giants. Troödon, for example, was a late
Cretaceous dinosaur that grew up to six feet long and four feet tall. Over the
past four years, Peter Dilworth, a robotics researcher at MIT's Leg Lab, has
built a 10-pound version of that dinosaur called Troody, the first two-legged
dinosaur robot. Dilworth consulted with paleontologist Gregory S. Paul to
ensure that the dimensions are as true to the real thing as possible, based on
fossils. Troody has 16 electric motors distributed among its hips, knees,
ankles, feet, and tail. There are two sensors on each motor to feed joint angle
and force readings to an onboard computer and a gyroscope to sense which
way is up and in which direction the robot is moving. When Dilworth turns the
robot on, it starts from a crouch like that of a nesting bird, then rises and
rocks slightly before getting its balance. Although Dilworth gives Troody
commands like "move forward" from a joystick, the robot plans its own
movements. "Seven hundred times a second, an onboard computer reads all
the sensors, does a bunch of math to figure out where all its joints are
positioned, where its mass is, all its physical properties," says Dilworth. "Then
a control algorithm decides whether it should be swinging a leg or how it
should be moving." Dilworth hopes to eventually have Troodys running around
museums so that visitors can get a more realistic sense of what dinosaurs may
have been like.
-- F.S.
Right now Dino should be able to handle uneven ground or walk up hills, and
engineers plan to take it outside for a test run soon. Dino doesn't yet have
sensors to tell it where it is on the planet or how to navigate around obstacles
like people. All of that would be necessary before it could run around on its
own. "But I wouldn't be that concerned about it, because much of that has
been developed for wheeled mobile robots," says Martin Buehler, who's built
small, running quadruped machines at the Ambulatory Robotics Lab of McGill
University in Montreal. He is impressed by the work done on Dino. "The hard
problem with all these robots is just to get the basic mechanics, dynamics, and
control right."
Dino has laser gyroscopes that give it a balancing mechanism "sort of like an
inner ear," Hillis says. "But right now it's not smart enough to take advantage
of that. Once it starts being able to do that, feels itself start to trip and catches
itself, I think it will start looking more and more natural. But that's a big
software job and nobody's ever done it before, so it's going to take a long
time. I think eventually you'll have lots of things like this walking around. Some
of them will look like robots, and some of them will look like dragons, and
some of them will look like big animals like rhinoceroses or woolly mammoths
or imaginary animals, all kinds of things." Buehler notes that legged robots like
Dino also would be able to perform extraordinary services like fire fighting,
containing nuclear and chemical hazards, defusing bombs, searching for land
mines, even exploring outer space. The key to all these activities, Buehler
points out, is the superior mobility of legs that work as well as Dino's.
Before the gigantic robot can go anywhere,
though, it must be able to make its own
decisions about where it should put its foot
next without stepping on someone. Eric
Haseltine, who heads research and
development for Disney, says his team of
Imagineers is already working on such
artificial-intelligence technology for
virtual-reality beings, and those programs might
be reusable in actual machines like Dino. "This
is a test bed that puts us on a road map toward
intelligent, self-directed characters," he says.
"We want them to be able to move around,
react, learn, and behave on their own."
Autonomous dinosaurs roaming at will are likely to amaze and amuse us, but
they will still be machines run by computers, and thus unlikely to operate
perfectly. So as independent as they may become, Haseltine thinks, there will
always have to be someone nearby watching-- with a finger on a kill switch.
Creating a full-scale Dino from simulations was an engineering challenge. "If
you just scaled up a grasshopper to the size of an elephant, it would crush
itself," says Hillis, because increases in scale create geometrically larger
increases in weight. Make anything twice as big and it gets eight times heavier,
so all its supports have to be thicker-- which makes it even heavier. That
extra mass, in turn, shoots up the forces of momentum and therefore the
power necessary to get the robot moving and to stop it once it is moving. "The
heavier and larger you scale an object, the more dynamic it becomes," says
Gill Pratt, head of the Leg Lab group at MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, which is building its own, but much smaller, walking dinosaur (see
"Walking on Two Legs," below). The more dynamic the robot, the more
difficult it is to keep balanced when walking.
Small robots with legs are also easier to
build because they can fall over without
causing much damage-- they don't have as
far to fall or as much mass. "We'd be in a
whole lot of trouble if this thing fell over,"
says Akhil Madhani, a mechanical engineer
on the project. Madhani and other designers
kept Dino's legs light by putting all the
motors in the shoulders and then using a
series of aluminum linkages and steel ball
screws to transfer power through the knees
to the ankles. Still, when Dino raises a foot,
its body flexes about two inches, which
sends vibrations through the whole chassis.
"If you have ten thousand pounds vibrating a
few inches, the forces are dramatic, maybe a
thousand pounds back and forth," says
Alexis Wieland, an applied mathematician
who worked on the robot's software. "So all
the walks are smoother than you'd really
think is necessary, because any jarring of the body can produce enormous
forces." Worse, when Dino lifts a foot, frame-flexing changes the distance
between the three feet still on the ground, trying to pull them apart. By
monitoring its motor currents, which shoot up due to the increased forces,
Dino can compensate. "It's another level of intelligence that says: 'I'm exactly
where I want to be, but, gosh, I'm fighting myself. Let me just move a few
millimeters here and, oh, there it goes; the currents are lower,' " says
Mezzatesta.
When Dino's sensors don't agree with its software or one another, it stops. "It
is truly autonomous; there's no preplanned trajectory," says Wieland. Without
any human input, Dino can shift its weight and move its feet until the motor
sensors tell it that it has reached its original starting stance. Still, the team has
had to learn to trust Dino. "When you're watching something generate
trajectories on the fly and you don't know up front what it's going to do and
the whole thing could fall over if it does the wrong thing, it's very nice to see it
do the right thing," says Madhani. "But it gets your heart rate up."
OK taco you need to explain this lameness filter thing, it keeps cutting me off, ican't see why..... read the next post for more
ok here is it, cut and past verbatem from the website
Like a turn-of-the-century hunter returning from safari, Frank Mezzatesta
stands next to a huge wooden crate he gleefully says contains something wild,
a beast never before known to man. And he can hardly wait to show it off.
With the click of a mouse, the front of the crate crashes to the floor, revealing
an enormous metal monster 13 feet tall, 18 feet long, and weighing 11,000
pounds-- the basic statistics of a loaded delivery truck. The creature seems
to hesitate for a moment, then moves forward. With deliberate but surprisingly
lithe steps, it strides across the floor, shifting its weight with the grace of a cat
as it lifts each foot in turn. Nearing a small group of people, it leans toward
them, then sways from side to side as if trying to decide whether to charge
them, eat them, or ignore them. "At this point in a previous demonstration, one
woman got up and ran," says Mezzatesta. The beast then takes a few steps
backward, turns slightly, and begins to dance. Swiveling left and right as much
as 7 degrees, it keeps its feet in place, making large undulations and
15-inch-deep knee bends. Before it is sent back to its box, some brave
observers amble over for a better look.
To understand what Dino's inventors are attempting, imagine this behemoth covered with
a shell that makes it look like a dinosaur. Then imagine it roaming freely on its own-- the
world's first truly autonomous robot.
Photo by Jan Staller
Mezzatesta is no big-game hunter; he's an engineer, and his beast is a robot
dubbed Dino. It is the largest robot ever built that has legs and doesn't have a
human inside. It contains its own power and moves autonomously after
receiving basic instructions like "move forward." Ultimately, a version of Dino
may be covered with a skin to make it look more like a triceratops. If
challenging problems are solved, it could be let loose in theme parks to roam
on its own. A machine that knows where it is, can make its own decisions,
and can move around as easily as a living animal has long been the Holy Grail
of roboticists. No one has yet been able to achieve this feat, even with small,
wheeled robots.
Birthed by Walt Disney Imagineering Research
and Development, Dino was dreamed up by
Danny Hillis, the man who invented massively
parallel supercomputers in the 1980s. "I always
wanted to build a robot dinosaur," says Hillis,
who, as a Disney Fellow, ran the Dino project
from 1998 until 2000, when he cofounded
Applied Minds, Inc. His team of engineers and
scientists was recruited from universities like
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
the University of California at Los Angeles.
They went to work in a walled-off area of a
large warehouse near the airport in Burbank.
To one side of the robot sits a bank of
computers where they created much of Dino's
software and one console that wirelessly sends the robot simple commands
like "walk backward."
Beyond those commands, Dino carries everything aboard needed to control
itself-- power from a bank of 55 sealed lead-acid batteries, three electric
motors to move each leg, a Pentium 700 megahertz processor for each leg,
and a central computer that receives commands, loads appropriate software
from the onboard memory, and coordinates each leg's response. A gyroscope
tells the robot how much it is leaning, and lasers at each ankle measure the
distance to the ground to help calculate how a step should be taken. Sensors
tell Dino how far each motor has rotated and the distance the robot has
actually moved. The robot constantly compares feedback readings to make
sure the multiple measurements make sense. It also monitors motors for
current spikes or high temperatures to determine whether too much force is
being applied, and it tracks velocity and acceleration limits.
Dino is impressive, but it is still a work in progress. Hillis originally wanted to
power the robot with a Corvette V-8 engine that pressurized oil-filled
hydraulic actuators. A test of that setup turned out to be far too noisy and
cumbersome. Now smooth, quiet electric motors and batteries have replaced
gasoline engines and hoses.
this thing is more than 11,000 pounds. thats 5,500 on each foot. if you see the pics, look at the size of each foot. I don't know if it can just walk around with out breaking up the ground, thier going to need to take some weight of before it just walks around a park
under this example you would need to buy a.AU address for each of you TLD for this to work. example- lets say you wanted ford.cars.au you could start.cars on your own but you would need to buy cars.au to make it fit in like the curent system
insiders at Samsung have reported one problem relating to the quality of the screen image, pet cats have
been found trying to pounce on and kill the
microsoft office paper clip. Sadly now cat has yet to succeed
Verisign is a private commercial company. As such, it can be regarded as more accountable than ICANN, because it has to answer to its shareholders and its consumers, which is a lot more than can be said for ICANN.
Thats the problem, shareholders come first. What we need is a system that is accountable to the USERS first and the shareholders second.
I'm free this weekend so I don't mind doing it.....
Aliens on pluto are reportedly unhappy with the decision, as they can now not live up to a bet they made last
year with the Martians to crash the probe. The Martians are said to be joyful over the news because pluto now has to
change it's name to snoopy.....
I all ready use this system, my dealer sells in small quantities( you know to get around the "dealing conviction") we have a
secure system ( He has a gun I have a gun) and it is very inexpensive(we are old buddies)
It is sad that they lost some money that could be spent on say another T1 or music program, but this is the type of thing that once it starts it will force every school district to think twice before they let lose thir boundless power. In the long run I think this type if judgment will be good for free thought
you did say IANAL but you really sound like one. Now that I think about it any lawyer worth his salt would say IANAL to cover his ass. so I'll just read into it. And yes you are right i'm in FL and no I do not have a large court doucment to shove up someones ass;) , althou this guy deserves it. The problem with holding no punches is you risk alot of counter blows, the point of my post( other than Karma )was to point out that at some point someone is going to take the next step in this type of fight, And I know some people that get violent if you cut them off from thire cable line ( no pr0n does strange things)
this just in a man by the name Dave Powell was found dead in his home today, police do not know the couse of death but they think it could have some thing to do with the subpoena up his ass. The FBI is using it's top secrest database of 1337 skript kiddies to look for leads......
Maybe she will learn about discression, and the way that social politics work. In the future, that could prove to be far more important than the science lesson
Hiding a problem does not fix it. As a kid I tried to push my toys under the bed when Ihad to clean my room, it only worked untel untel they started coming out the other side.
I dunno...maybe it's just me, but I didn't see any notes of bitterness in his email. It just looked like a polite "They
wanna do this, and I wanna do that" explanation of a decision to leave. And the comments about backdoors --
that just sounds like one more assurance for the (overly?) concerned that there *weren't* any.
I read alot of bitterness in this letter, let me explain. if you have ever watched Congress or parlament (the UK version) then you will see a trend. Evertime one senitor is about to diagree with a point someone else makes he usually starts with something like "my good Friend" or" he really is a great guy but..." you see the first part( or rather the best way ) of presenting a contray point is to show that you don't want to attack the person but the isdea. He is smart to say as little as he did, and it does tell me alot about what he wanted to say. if he just wanted to leave NAI he would have said,"they are a great group of guys but I want to try some other things"or" my kids are killing me to play ball" instead he made it a point to bring up the backdoors, that is very telling to me. or I'm just paranoid.
Duh it was the Moon aliens!, really look at the angle, it was a camera on anohter leg of the LEM, thats why it looked so bad. It was a small camera stuck to the outside made to take the hard trip down.
Now the real question is will you sue me:) I don't own ( or lease for that mater) the domain name RR.com but I use it all the time in my E-mail [(MIkeBrown)@(Cfl).(RR).(com)] so does ownership count or does use count.
I thought this was a problem in IEEE 802.11b, not IEEE 802.11. I think I am missing something but I only heard about the problem in IEEE 802.11b. is b just an extention of IEEE 802.11, and if so what is IEEE 802.11?
Slashdot Mirror
________
Dino has laser gyroscopes that give it a balancing mechanism "sort of like an inner ear," Hillis says. "But right now it's not smart enough to take advantage of that. Once it starts being able to do that, feels itself start to trip and catches itself, I think it will start looking more and more natural. But that's a big software job and nobody's ever done it before, so it's going to take a long time. I think eventually you'll have lots of things like this walking around. Some of them will look like robots, and some of them will look like dragons, and some of them will look like big animals like rhinoceroses or woolly mammoths or imaginary animals, all kinds of things." Buehler notes that legged robots like Dino also would be able to perform extraordinary services like fire fighting, containing nuclear and chemical hazards, defusing bombs, searching for land mines, even exploring outer space. The key to all these activities, Buehler points out, is the superior mobility of legs that work as well as Dino's.
Before the gigantic robot can go anywhere, though, it must be able to make its own decisions about where it should put its foot next without stepping on someone. Eric Haseltine, who heads research and development for Disney, says his team of Imagineers is already working on such artificial-intelligence technology for virtual-reality beings, and those programs might be reusable in actual machines like Dino. "This is a test bed that puts us on a road map toward intelligent, self-directed characters," he says. "We want them to be able to move around, react, learn, and behave on their own."
Autonomous dinosaurs roaming at will are likely to amaze and amuse us, but they will still be machines run by computers, and thus unlikely to operate perfectly. So as independent as they may become, Haseltine thinks, there will always have to be someone nearby watching-- with a finger on a kill switch.
________
Small robots with legs are also easier to build because they can fall over without causing much damage-- they don't have as far to fall or as much mass. "We'd be in a whole lot of trouble if this thing fell over," says Akhil Madhani, a mechanical engineer on the project. Madhani and other designers kept Dino's legs light by putting all the motors in the shoulders and then using a series of aluminum linkages and steel ball screws to transfer power through the knees to the ankles. Still, when Dino raises a foot, its body flexes about two inches, which sends vibrations through the whole chassis. "If you have ten thousand pounds vibrating a few inches, the forces are dramatic, maybe a thousand pounds back and forth," says Alexis Wieland, an applied mathematician who worked on the robot's software. "So all the walks are smoother than you'd really think is necessary, because any jarring of the body can produce enormous forces." Worse, when Dino lifts a foot, frame-flexing changes the distance between the three feet still on the ground, trying to pull them apart. By monitoring its motor currents, which shoot up due to the increased forces, Dino can compensate. "It's another level of intelligence that says: 'I'm exactly where I want to be, but, gosh, I'm fighting myself. Let me just move a few millimeters here and, oh, there it goes; the currents are lower,' " says Mezzatesta.
When Dino's sensors don't agree with its software or one another, it stops. "It is truly autonomous; there's no preplanned trajectory," says Wieland. Without any human input, Dino can shift its weight and move its feet until the motor sensors tell it that it has reached its original starting stance. Still, the team has had to learn to trust Dino. "When you're watching something generate trajectories on the fly and you don't know up front what it's going to do and the whole thing could fall over if it does the wrong thing, it's very nice to see it do the right thing," says Madhani. "But it gets your heart rate up."
OK taco you need to explain this lameness filter thing, it keeps cutting me off, ican't see why..... read the next post for more
________
Like a turn-of-the-century hunter returning from safari, Frank Mezzatesta stands next to a huge wooden crate he gleefully says contains something wild, a beast never before known to man. And he can hardly wait to show it off. With the click of a mouse, the front of the crate crashes to the floor, revealing an enormous metal monster 13 feet tall, 18 feet long, and weighing 11,000 pounds-- the basic statistics of a loaded delivery truck. The creature seems to hesitate for a moment, then moves forward. With deliberate but surprisingly lithe steps, it strides across the floor, shifting its weight with the grace of a cat as it lifts each foot in turn. Nearing a small group of people, it leans toward them, then sways from side to side as if trying to decide whether to charge them, eat them, or ignore them. "At this point in a previous demonstration, one woman got up and ran," says Mezzatesta. The beast then takes a few steps backward, turns slightly, and begins to dance. Swiveling left and right as much as 7 degrees, it keeps its feet in place, making large undulations and 15-inch-deep knee bends. Before it is sent back to its box, some brave observers amble over for a better look.
To understand what Dino's inventors are attempting, imagine this behemoth covered with a shell that makes it look like a dinosaur. Then imagine it roaming freely on its own-- the world's first truly autonomous robot. Photo by Jan Staller
Mezzatesta is no big-game hunter; he's an engineer, and his beast is a robot dubbed Dino. It is the largest robot ever built that has legs and doesn't have a human inside. It contains its own power and moves autonomously after receiving basic instructions like "move forward." Ultimately, a version of Dino may be covered with a skin to make it look more like a triceratops. If challenging problems are solved, it could be let loose in theme parks to roam on its own. A machine that knows where it is, can make its own decisions, and can move around as easily as a living animal has long been the Holy Grail of roboticists. No one has yet been able to achieve this feat, even with small, wheeled robots.
Birthed by Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development, Dino was dreamed up by Danny Hillis, the man who invented massively parallel supercomputers in the 1980s. "I always wanted to build a robot dinosaur," says Hillis, who, as a Disney Fellow, ran the Dino project from 1998 until 2000, when he cofounded Applied Minds, Inc. His team of engineers and scientists was recruited from universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Los Angeles. They went to work in a walled-off area of a large warehouse near the airport in Burbank. To one side of the robot sits a bank of computers where they created much of Dino's software and one console that wirelessly sends the robot simple commands like "walk backward."
Beyond those commands, Dino carries everything aboard needed to control itself-- power from a bank of 55 sealed lead-acid batteries, three electric motors to move each leg, a Pentium 700 megahertz processor for each leg, and a central computer that receives commands, loads appropriate software from the onboard memory, and coordinates each leg's response. A gyroscope tells the robot how much it is leaning, and lasers at each ankle measure the distance to the ground to help calculate how a step should be taken. Sensors tell Dino how far each motor has rotated and the distance the robot has actually moved. The robot constantly compares feedback readings to make sure the multiple measurements make sense. It also monitors motors for current spikes or high temperatures to determine whether too much force is being applied, and it tracks velocity and acceleration limits.
Dino is impressive, but it is still a work in progress. Hillis originally wanted to power the robot with a Corvette V-8 engine that pressurized oil-filled hydraulic actuators. A test of that setup turned out to be far too noisy and cumbersome. Now smooth, quiet electric motors and batteries have replaced gasoline engines and hoses.
Damn lameness filter. look at my next post
________
________
www.powderfinger.music.au
the TLD is .AU
the domain is Music
under this example you would need to buy a .AU address for each of you TLD for this to work. example- lets say you wanted ford.cars.au you could start .cars on your own but you would need to buy cars.au to make it fit in like the curent system
________
insiders at Samsung have reported one problem relating to the quality of the screen image, pet cats have been found trying to pounce on and kill the microsoft office paper clip. Sadly now cat has yet to succeed
________
________
Thats the problem, shareholders come first. What we need is a system that is accountable to the USERS first and the shareholders second.
I'm free this weekend so I don't mind doing it.....
________
do you hear that.....it's..... it's ICANN breaking out into song....GOD BLESS AMARICA....
________
Aliens on pluto are reportedly unhappy with the decision, as they can now not live up to a bet they made last year with the Martians to crash the probe. The Martians are said to be joyful over the news because pluto now has to change it's name to snoopy.....
________
________
________
________
________
________
Sorry to hear it, get some help.
Maybe she will learn about discression, and the way that social politics work. In the future, that could prove to be far more important than the science lesson
Hiding a problem does not fix it. As a kid I tried to push my toys under the bed when Ihad to clean my room, it only worked untel untel they started coming out the other side.
________
________
________
Note to self, withdraw bid for anthrax from EBAY and cancel the order for the micro-sat,
move to plan 2
MUhhahahah
________
I read alot of bitterness in this letter, let me explain. if you have ever watched Congress or parlament (the UK version) then you will see a trend. Evertime one senitor is about to diagree with a point someone else makes he usually starts with something like "my good Friend" or" he really is a great guy but..." you see the first part( or rather the best way ) of presenting a contray point is to show that you don't want to attack the person but the isdea. He is smart to say as little as he did, and it does tell me alot about what he wanted to say. if he just wanted to leave NAI he would have said,"they are a great group of guys but I want to try some other things"or" my kids are killing me to play ball" instead he made it a point to bring up the backdoors, that is very telling to me. or I'm just paranoid.
________
________
________
For the corprate types: NO this is not a flame, it's a joke, Lawyers/linux zelots need not read the above
________
________