One Giant Step for Humanoids

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?"

Re:Sending to mars it interesting, but...

[Boronx]

What kind of wingspan would you need to fly on mars? Now, a Titan flyer could get by with little stubs, or maybe some kind of lighter-than-air flyer, that could easily land to do analysis of objects. We really ought to send flyers into the gas giants, too.

Why not?

[lawpoop]

"And hey, why not send them to Mars to look for those microbes?"

Probably because there are much more efficient ways to locomote. Bipedalism is risky, especially if you want to bend over a lot to pick things up.

I'm in favor of a radially symmetrical spider-like walker that can turn in any direction, or even invert it legs and continue walking if it gets turned upside down. This would make it much more flexible in navigating the Martian environment.

You could have a central ring with legs attatched all around it, and then a rotating body that includes sensors, power supply, and a grappling hand. The single grappling hand descends from the center and pulls samples up into the body for storage/analysis.

A bit of the old Hubris?

[Exluddite]

Hats off to the folks who are working on these robots. They truly are amazing bits of engineering. But are we really so narcissistic that we think something that looks and acts human is a good design? After all, the robots that really are useful to us (mostly in manufacturing) don't look human.

Re:Prosthetics

[BWJones]

We scientists are always making stuff the defense department is interested in. You would absolutely be amazed at the possibilities that people think of for basic science research. In fact, I am going to be meeting with a bunch of DOD folks in a couple of months because they are interested in what we are doing. Not everything the DOD does though is involved with taking of life. There is a considerable interest in battlefield medicine and such. At any rate, this is an aspect of the Bush administrations push to applied as opposed to basic research that troubles me. We should not push basic research to the sidelines because that is where advances start from that yes, even the DOD can take advantage of.

Re:Muscles, perhaps?

[Dachannien]

Actually, "letting them drop" isn't very far from the truth. Of course, we don't just let our feet fall straight down. We swing our legs forward and let our feet catch ourselves before we fall flat on our faces. We actually let a lot of the motion during swing phase happen via gravity, as our lower legs rotate down and forward around the knee joint.

Probably more to the point of what the blurb was talking about, but didn't really explain: human walking uses dynamic stability. During the period of time where one foot is off the ground, our center of mass is not stably supported by the other foot. Compare this to the insect tripod gait, where at all times the center of mass is within the triangle formed by drawing a line between the three stanced feet - thus making it *statically* stable. And compare this to Asimo and the other famous bipedal robots out of Japan - they maintain a statically stable support by balancing the center of mass directly over one of the legs, but they aren't dynamically stable like humans can be.

Re:get on with it already

[scubaed]

But don't invent Yet Another Bi-pedal Locomotion Technique, that problem is solved more than enough to move on to the next problem.

Nope, I'm sorry, but it has barely begun to being solved (and this article is in the right direction).

Asimo does not solve the problem, it merely over-engineers it into oblivion. Linearizing every joint and making it look somewhat realistic does not solve the problem, that's why it can only run 30 minutes or so on a charge (pun intended).

Re:Muscles, perhaps?

[cnettel]

Also, remember that a leg is not dropping. I know you indirectly said so by mentioning the energy stores and so on, but I think it's important to make it an explicit point.

We approximate a pendulum rather than letting the foot be some kind of ball attached to a "string" (the leg) bouncing up and down. Human movements without a proper grasp of angular momentum gives strange interpretation, like that of the OP.

Specialized, but equally amazing I think

[yuckysocks]

This website has a neat video of dancing robots on it. It obviously doesn't carry the same implications
that a low-energy walking robot does, but the motor control and balance gyros and the what-have-you
needed for this act are still pretty impressive.

Video [impress.co.jp]

Source page [typepad.com]

Logical conclusion

[EmbeddedJanitor]

We're somewhere along the following evolutionary parth for war:

One king doesn't like the other king so he goes beats him up. Unfortunately he also gets hurt in the process.

Hey instead of **me** being hurt I'll send some blokes (==soldiers) over to beat up the other king.

The other king doesn't like to be beaten up, so he puts his soldiers in the way. We now have two armies beating eachother up.

Hey let's not send our soldiers into the battlefield to get hurt, let's send robots. Nobody gets hurt. Soldiers can sit at home and eat pizza.

The enemy then gets pissed that these robots beat up their people and build their own. Now we have robots beating up on robots.

Next, the one army gets pissed that their robots are getting beaten up and start hacking the enemy comms to stop the other robots. The enemy responds by hacking the hackers...

So what's the logical conclusion? Is war going to just end up being a big computer simulation with nobody getting hurt? Perhaps the kings should just go decide over a nice game of chess!

Re:get on with it already

[FinestLittleSpace]

No, it's not. Humans (and animals) have the sense which is more important than ANYTHING in public situations: general awareness.

what if a little kids runs round it's feet, or a kid runs in front of them? The robot goes NEAAAAAARGH and falls over.

Until they can produce organic robots who use their legs without so much bloody automation, then you can start saying theyre ready.

Re:Prosthetics

[Infinityis]

Here I thought you were going to suggest using robots instead of humans on the front lines, and then you talked about just fixing humans with robotic parts. I should think someday we won't have to risk lives so often. We'll have robot wars between countries, and people will get used to the idea of not risking their lives to exercise control over others.

course, that's probably a ridiculous notion...

Re:Why not?

[savuporo]

"Bipedalism is risky, especially if you want to bend over a lot to pick things up"

Well, if you want a robust robot it must also be able to get up from any position it might get into. Insects have trouble with getting back on their feet if turned on their backs ( and of course yes they are more stable than bipeds when standing up ). But as you'd have to plan for such robustness anyhow in unknown environments, biped is more practical.
There is another advantage that human-like bipeds hold over other locomotion types - for human environments, like insides of buildings, vehicles, heck - kitchens etc, they are a perfect fit, i.e. the environment is tailor-made for them. For instance, human-like biped, given sufficient processing power and sensory capacity, its a lot easier task to navigate around in a skyscraper, enter and operate the lifts, walk up the stairs etc, than for instance a wheeled robot.