One Giant Step for Humanoids 223
An anonymous reader writes "There are a few robots that do amazing things. Honda's Asimo can walk backward and climb stairs. Sega's idog can dance to music. A tougher nut to crack has been making robots walk like humans. Today, scientists introduce three humanoid striders at the annual AAAS meeting. Unlike other robots that have to power every move, these three save energy by letting gravity do a lot of the work. Like humans, they pick up their feet and just let 'em drop. Engineers say they'll inform the next generations of humanoids and also improve design of robotic prostheses for people. And hey, why not send them to Mars to look for those microbes?"
sites (Score:5, Informative)
Delft [tudelft.nl]
Cornell [cornell.edu]
MIT [mit.edu]
Prosthetics (Score:5, Informative)
There are a couple of interesting recent additions to the Internet that cover these issues. One is an article [wired.com] by Steve Silberman [levity.com] in Wired [wired.com] and the other very interesting site is Stuart Hughes blog [blogspot.com]. Stuart is a world news producer with the BBC who unfortunately stepped on a landmine covering the Iraq war and now writes fairly frequently about "stumpy" and his prosthetic leg.
Sending to mars it interesting, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Walk like a human? (Score:2, Informative)
But why.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Muscles, perhaps? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, what you say *seems* intuitively right but is proved not-quite-correct by research in passive-dynamics. The energy required to make precisely controlled steps (i.e., muscularly-actuated) is much greater than the energy humans (or any other legged creature, for that matter) expend on walking. Bipedal walking for animals of our size is possible only because humans have evolved adaptive, energy-saving strategies for bipedal motion (for instance, the long tendons and ligaments of our legs are used as passive energy stores).
However, this is not to say that human walking is not a complex coordination of many muscular systems. It's just that steps are not as controlled as we'd like to think. This is by design, so that we can adapt quickly to unpredictable surfaces. Robots that try to be very controlled in walking usually are very slow because they must do many dynamic calculations that humans simply don't do because of the way our legs are designed.
Re:get on with it already (Score:3, Informative)
There was an article not so long ago about a robot that can stand up from lying on the floor. That was some pretty big progress. However, even that robot is still very far from a human. It needs almost two minutes for that!
Current robots barely walk properly. They still have a long way to go until they can do things like jumping on one leg, which are trivial for humans.
More details in Science research paper, videos (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the abstract text:
Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers
Steve Collins, Andy Ruina, Russ Tedrake, Martijn Wisse
Passive-dynamic walkers are simple mechanical devices, composed of solid parts connected by joints, that walk stably down a slope. They have no motors or controllers, yet can have remarkably humanlike motions. This suggests that these machines are useful models of human locomotion; however, they cannot walk on level ground. Here we present three robots based on passive-dynamics, with small active power sources substituted for gravity, which can walk on level ground. These robots use less control and less energy than other powered robots, yet walk more naturally, further suggesting the importance of passive-dynamics in human locomotion.
Re:Why not? (Score:2, Informative)
Odex 1 [inetnebr.com]
Large and strong, this dude could pick up the end of a pickup truck and move it around.
Several different approachs. (Score:4, Informative)
If you are doing a real flyer, you would need huge wings as the atmospere is thiiiinnnn. But, use some helium/hydrogen in a collapsiable wing, combined with small rockets, it is very doable. Think in terms of a vtol aircraft such as the british harrier. Small wings.
Of course, a small number of ballons with small camera might produce some very intersting results. While we would not have good control over where they went, they would be close enough to the surface to take some very good pix that could be relayed from sat. above.. These ballons could then be landed with small amounts of equipment, but obviously, this is more of a serindipity approach to checking the surface.