There are at least two advantages to legged robots that I'm aware of (though the technology is not necessarily there to take advantage of them). The first is the potential to climb much larger obstacles for a robot of a given size. Robots using rocker-bogie wheel systems such as the Mars Pathfinder vehicle have amazing climbing abilities, but this is nothing compared to what a human can accomplish.
The second is a potential energy savings. Imagine a wheeled vehicle traveling over rough terrain. It's constantly climbing over obstacles which takes energy that is just lost when it falls down the other side. Meanwhile, a legged robot can keep its body above the height of most obstacles and just step over the top of them -- more of its energy goes towards its forward motion instead of the up-and-down motion of the wheeled vehicle.
Oh, another thing is the ability to tolerate loss of an actuator. If one of the wheels were to stop working on a wheeled vehicle, the rest of the wheels would have to drag that one along. Meanwhile, there's been some neat work showing the robustness of legged robots to such problems by groups such as the Biorobotics Lab at Case Western.
In the end though, it depends on your application as to which is best. I just can't see that one approach could be better than the other in all cases. Just as one example, I think legged robots have really cool potential for planetary exploration for the reasons given above, but certainly anything spending most of its time on flat ground (agricultural equipment, anything on-road, etc) would perform better with wheels.
before hidden surface removal. This would be really cool if you couldn't see through the surface of the objects and see the rear-facing surfaces as well as the front-facing ones. Check out the movie of the mathematical function and you can see the surface get brighter and dimmer as you look through the surface a varying number of times.
I don't see this as surprising at all. People who go on to get advanced degrees don't do it for the money.
I got a PhD because I wanted to work at the cutting edge of research in my field. I'd like to live a comfortable lifestyle, but loving what I do is the most important factor.
The mirror (or is it a screen?) being in the center does not fix this problem. Sure, it might in the simple case of a convex object, but any interesting 3D objects aren't convex and so this doesn't work in the general case. (even for a convex object, just imagine looking at the display from the top since it rotates the screen around a vertical axis)
Yeah, I did see that they say they're working on hidden surface removal, but this REQUIRES knowledge of the location of the viewer -- something they appear to be trying to avoid. (This assumes that they haven't come up with a way to fix the shine-through problem.)
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least two advantages to legged robots that I'm aware of (though the technology is not necessarily there to take advantage of them). The first is the potential to climb much larger obstacles for a robot of a given size. Robots using rocker-bogie wheel systems such as the Mars Pathfinder vehicle have amazing climbing abilities, but this is nothing compared to what a human can accomplish.
The second is a potential energy savings. Imagine a wheeled vehicle traveling over rough terrain. It's constantly climbing over obstacles which takes energy that is just lost when it falls down the other side. Meanwhile, a legged robot can keep its body above the height of most obstacles and just step over the top of them -- more of its energy goes towards its forward motion instead of the up-and-down motion of the wheeled vehicle.
Oh, another thing is the ability to tolerate loss of an actuator. If one of the wheels were to stop working on a wheeled vehicle, the rest of the wheels would have to drag that one along. Meanwhile, there's been some neat work showing the robustness of legged robots to such problems by groups such as the Biorobotics Lab at Case Western.
In the end though, it depends on your application as to which is best. I just can't see that one approach could be better than the other in all cases. Just as one example, I think legged robots have really cool potential for planetary exploration for the reasons given above, but certainly anything spending most of its time on flat ground (agricultural equipment, anything on-road, etc) would perform better with wheels.
movies here
I don't see this as surprising at all. People who go on to get advanced degrees don't do it for the money.
I got a PhD because I wanted to work at the cutting edge of research in my field. I'd like to live a comfortable lifestyle, but loving what I do is the most important factor.
Yeah, I did see that they say they're working on hidden surface removal, but this REQUIRES knowledge of the location of the viewer -- something they appear to be trying to avoid. (This assumes that they haven't come up with a way to fix the shine-through problem.)