Chairbot Walks You Around While You Sit

Gary writes "What do you get when you combine a robot and a chair? The Hubo FX-1 chairbot, of course. In what is perhaps my favorite robot design yet, this giant chair with legs looks like it came out of some ridiculous 80's sci-fi movie or something, but it's very, very real. HUBO FX-1 is two meters in height, and weighs 150 kg. The person sitting can control the robot easily using the built in joystick. Each ankle has a 3-axis force/torque sensor which measures the normal force and 2 moments. Each foot has an inclination sensor which measures the angle of the slope. Also, the rate gyro and the inclination sensor of the body allow the device to stabilize itself."

Technical Paper

[morcheeba]

I found this interesting technical paper on the robot: Experimental Realization of Dynamic Walking for a Human-Riding Biped Robot, HUBO FX-1 [cmu.edu]. It has lots of pretty pictures and graphs and gets in to the control-system problems they had when they developed it. Each step runs through three different balance control strategies, which they outline in detail. It's almost enough information to build your own!

Re:One thought

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I've got a quad friend who'd buy one of these in a shot if they were cheap enough.

To go hiking in the hills, walking over dunes on the beach, all the things that wheels aren't really suitable for.

Re:It's a little large.

[gr8_phk]

The Ibot [ibotnow.com] is already available today. I did some development on it for a while and can tell you it's more comfortable than any powered device you've ever ridden. It can do stairs too.

Toyota

[Scrameustache]

Why?

Because they saw the one Toyota made years ago [toyota.co.jp] and thought "neat"?

In all seriousness....

[grimdawg]

....the applications of this and derivatives seem fairly extensive.

There's an inherent advantage of legs over wheels - that's why we have to go out of our way to make ramps for the wheelchair-bound. This device represents, to me, an important step (HAH!) in design of legged machines. Having a robot which can walk intelligently over unpredictable surfaces would be pretty useful.

Just off the top of my head, here are some areas this could come in handy:

Construction/mining/etc. - As it is, everything needs to be carted around by trucks, which aren't maneuverable in the way a set of legs can be;

The disabled - as mentioned by a few, the wheel in wheelchair makes things very tough for our legless friends. With a legchair, they could maybe climb stairs and go over rougher terrain;

Military - same deal. It's basically the first step toward a genuine Mech;

Automated factories - no longer are we limited to wheels/tracks/conveyor belts. There's gotta be some advantage to that.

Space? - The idea of a droid repairing your spaceship just got a little less out there, maybe?

There are probably more, too. I think the chair itself is retarded, but the research that's gone into getting a set of functioning, intelligent legs is pretty useful.

Re:One thought

[mpe]

I don't know of any animals that naturally walk on two legs. Even primates don't normally walk on their legs...

Guess you must have missed these animals known as "birds" as well as their extinct ancestors, therapod dinosaurs :)