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Comments: 216 +- Hardware: Toyota Reveals A Humanoid Robot That Can Run on Saturday August 01 2009, @04:44PM
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Peter writes "Toyota researchers have unveiled a new humanoid robot that can run at 7 km/h, which is faster than Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO. Toyota's robot can also keep itself balanced when pushed, as shown in the video."
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Submission: Toyota running humanoid robot by Anonymous Coward
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Sponsorship (Score:2)
OMG?! How much is that in miles?! (Score:2, Funny)
I'm American! I have no idea if that is fast or not! Someone help me, do I need to be afraid or can I outrun it? Even if it's slow, I probably can't outrun it.
Re:OMG?! How much is that in miles?! (Score:5, Informative)
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No, 7 Km/h means only about 2050m/h in *room temperature*. That's just 1.27 miles per hour.
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Google does unit conversion for you.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=7+km+to+miles&aq=f&oq=&aqi= [google.com]
Re:OMG?! How much is that in miles?! (Score:5, Funny)
> I need to be afraid or can I outrun it?
No, because you are an American.
A single 357 magnum round to just about any part of this thing will have it crashing to the ground. These things are way more fragile than a biker on PCP.
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Fast walk? (not run?) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fast walk? (not run?) (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure it is a run. Notice around 0:53 in the video both feet are off the ground. You can tell because they are both moving forward at the same.
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Re:Fast walk? (not run?) (Score:4, Funny)
It looks to me like their is something below the foot that makes contact before the white part of the foot makes contact. From the high speed camera, it looks like this make contact on the front foot before the back foot leaves the ground. I thought to be running, both feet need to be in the air at once. Otherwise you were walking. Maybe I am just seeing the video wrong? Regardless, it looks very impressive.
If you watch closely around :53 you can see that both feet are not touching the ground. But really, when you're being pursued by a hyper-ambulatory Asimo, my mind's on survival, not robo-locomotive kinematics!
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Re:Fast walk? (not run?) (Score:5, Funny)
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Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on if you're investing for dollars or inventions, I suppose. I think Toyota has a good research program, and there's a good chance that long-term more exciting things will come out of it. But it's a totally different question whether this will result in Toyota stock being worth significantly more. They could totally implode in the medium-term if their actual business (selling cars) does badly, for example. Or they could fail to figure out how to commercialize the technology, Xerox PARC style. Etc.
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sadly, most investors are in it for the quick buck these days, when in the (distant) past, it was much more long term...
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oh i think they have a firm plan for commercialize this, btw. Japan's population is growing ever older (as is the rest of the developed world, as more people push education and career before family, and have smaller families when they finally get round to it), and have a very xenophobic outlook (tho the samurai of old benefited from from immigrant workers, said workers where seen as lower then the lowest nipponese, and the descendants from said workers may well find themselves discriminated against to this
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Ah yeah, I had forgotten about that angle. It's an interesting viewpoint--- I can't find the link again, but I recall reading a study that found that the idea of robots taking care of old people was viewed as a dystopian possibility in the U.S., but a utopian one in Japan.
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Although (to reply to my own post), an interesting study [stanford.edu] [PDF] I ran across while looking for that other one suggests American attitudes towards robot employees are warming up in some areas:
Forget Skynet and Terminators (Score:5, Funny)
Once the robots have eliminated all their human creators, the world-wide war will be Honda vs Toyota.
Sadly, the goal of the war will be to eliminate all commercial competition for the car divisions of Honda and Toyota but there will be no humans left to buy them.
And like a house of cards, it's going to be checkmate right in the bullseye.
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The humanoid robots will drive cars, they can only run at 4 miles per hour!
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or they could pull that old mecha trick, and have powered rollerskates built into their feet...
Why are they squatting robots? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why are they squatting robots? (Score:5, Informative)
Why are all of these robots configured to work in a squatting position?
* lower center of balance
* better shock absorption
* "neutral" position more centered in range of motion
Humans don't walk that way because we have very long (and weak) legs relative to our body size and we'd exert too much energy keeping our muscles tense. But most other animals keep their legs in a "crouched" position all the time. Examine some skeletons.
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Given that 41% of museums mount the skeletons incorrectly, I doubt it would be that useful.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/01/26/the-flesh-of-physics/ [discovermagazine.com]
Re:Why are they squatting robots? (Score:4, Informative)
The robot's stance actually a lot closer to the position that athletes take when they're expecting interference with their balance - football players, martial artists, etc. all work to keep their center of balance low so that it's harder to tip them over.
Standing fully upright locks your knees and actually makes you much more unbalanced; we only do it because it's less exertion for our leg muscles.
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1. Squatting allows the foot to be lifted more quickly when it needs to be repositioned.
2. It is hard to make a 'ligament' that can still apply significant torque when the joint is straight. Being able to lock the joint is an energy saving feature, probably not the most important of the criteria here.
3. In a knee straight position, the knee joint can only apply force in one direction. This means that the ankle joint has to be used in the other direction (and the moment arm of the ankle is longer, since
Not much suspension, but some. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's not much of a moment of suspension, but there is some. There's a little more than with Research ASIMO.
Most legged running researchers are trying to maintain some stability criterion, and avoid spending much time in suspension, with all legs off the ground. This may be the wrong approach.
There are two schools of thought in this field. There are the people who start with walking and try to work up to running, and the people who start with hopping and try to work down to running. Most work is from the first school, but BigDog comes from the hopping faction.
Suspension is sometimes a good way to get out of trouble. You get to move all the limbs while in flight and get completely new footholds. Watch some basketball and you'll see this frequently. There's also a half-suspension in quadrupeds, as when you see a horse kick up their hind end to reposition the legs.
The technology in this area can get much, much better. The hardware, in robots, sensors, and computers, is almost good enough. Now we need smarter control algorithms.
Spring-like leg actuators (Score:5, Informative)
To run smoothly and efficiently robots will need joint motors that are springy and compliant just like human muscles.
I tend to agree. What you want to emulate a muscle is a spring with a variable spring constant and zero position. There are several ways to do that. A double-ended pneumatic cylinder can do it; if you pressurize both ends at a high pressure, it's stiff, and if you pressurize both ends at low pressure, it's springy. Relative differences in pressure change the zero position. If the valves are close to the cylinder, position control of pneumatic cylinders works. Someone at CWRU built a robot this way. Of course, you need an onboard air compressor.
There's a new variation on this concept - a device which is both a pneumatic cylinder and a linear motor. A pneumatic cylinder is a piston in a tube, and a linear motor is a magnet in a tube with coils outside the tube. So a device can be built which has a magnet as the piston and coils outside the tube, allowing both pneumatic and electrical operation. The linear motor does the fine positioning and the pneumatic system provides high power when needed.
It's possible to do an adjustable spring mechanically, using two actuators pulling on opposed springs. That's been tried, but most of the designs involve pulleys and strings, which tend to be troublesome. I've been working on a new string-less mechanical design in that area, one that can fit inside the space required for an R/C servo of the type used on hobbyist robots.
BigDog is hydraulic, and its actuators are very stiff. They had to put a bicycle shock absorber at the end of each leg to handle the landing shocks. But BigDog doesn't recover significant running energy. The Legged Squad Support System, the militarized successor to BigDog, may have energy recovery. There are things one can do with hydraulic accumulators and extra valves to get spring-like behavior out of hydraulics. Still, BigDog does a nice job; energy recovery will improve gas mileage, not stability.
There's also a way to fake spring-like behavior, using a "series elastic actuator". This is a leadscrew-type linear actuator in series with a stiff spring. When the spring is compressed, the drive motor frantically tries to release the pressure before the spring bottoms out. This doesn't really store much energy, but it can be used to fake something that does. Pratt at MIT came up with this, and it's a useful research tool.
There have been a number of other, more exotic muscle-line actuators, including fluids that change properties in an electric field, but so far, they're all worse than the ones mentioned above.
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Why hopping is the key. (Score:3, Insightful)
One would assume that it's not unreasonably hard to start from walking and move to running.
Yes, one would assume that. And one would be wrong.
People have been studying locomotion for centuries. Until the 1980s, almost everyone obsessed on gait issue. There's an extensive literature on stride length, footfall pattern, and similar gait issues. Most locomotion studies focused on straight-line movement, too.
The real issue is handling the hard cases - slipping, tripping, hills, finding footholds. That's
Run, ASIMO, run! (Score:5, Funny)
First learn how humans do it (Score:2)
I don't get it. While impressive and cool-looking in itself, it's obvious that the robot misses a host of methods the human body can employ to move gracefully and efficiently on two legs. I'd suggest developers of humanoid robots try to understand how humans do it. Research into martial arts should teach them a thing or two, T'ai-Chi Ch'uan should work especially well.
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If you had as few degrees of joint freedom as this robot, you wouldn't look too graceful and efficient either...
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...does it run linux?
No, it just runs. In Soviet Russia, Linux-running overlord, for one, welcomes you?
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Nope. But it can run all over it.
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I think we all know what GM's response [wordpress.com] will be.
Re:One step closer to robot world domination (Score:5, Interesting)
Only sad part is that in Japan those are evolving for peaceful reasons whereas in USofA for military purposes. Check recent stories about exoskeletons before you mod me down as flamebait...
Sad as cooperation for peaceful purposes would make world a much better place, and military one, no comments. Recently they started testing some of airborne droids to shot on meat targets without human interaction. Sad where all this is going...
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Re:One step closer to robot world domination (Score:5, Funny)
Not necessarily, it could also be seen as, the USA (and others) are creating robots that are already against us, whereas Japan (and others) are creating ones that will eventually turn against us.
What better way to do? Get one of these helper bots in every home, on every street corner, flip the switch and they all take over without any loss of (your, the conquering) lives. Not that I'm saying that's what they are doing, but simply because these appear benign, doesn't necessarily mean that's the ultimate goal, although I do like to think they are to remain harmless, "here to do good thing" robots, as the Japanese have generally always done with them, from Karakuri Ningyo's [wikipedia.org] brining tea, to these.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakuri_ningyo [wikipedia.org]
my bad.
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Re:One step closer to robot world domination (Score:5, Insightful)
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I recently watched Gundam Wing again, and even in a cartoon series, some of the characters make extensive speeches about how robot war desensitizes humanity and is therefore wrong. War should be fought by people so that they can understand its terrible cost and will work to oppose and end it.
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Humans have to take the risk of dying to make them avoid violence. If they do not run the risk, it is easier to inflict violence on others. It is philosophically easier to kill with a gun than with a knife, because you are removed from the real physical act. A robot can kill on your behalf without you being on the same continent. How does that reduce the tendency for violence ?
Either you are against violence or you're not - which is it ? People shouldn't have to die at all. Making machines do your d
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But I thought the Japanese invented Gundam Suits and various Mech armors like that.
Incorrect. The first "mobile armor" suit I'm aware of was conceived in Starship Troopers [wikipedia.org], which won the Hugo Award in 1950. Gundam didn't come about until 1979, and Mechs (as in, BattleMechs) did not come about until the 1980s, and were derived from the Japanese mecha. The first instance of "mecha" I could find was in 1956, which could certainly have originated from Heinlein's work. (That said, ideas tend to occur in spurts, and the 1950s was a pretty big time for the relatively-new powerful mechanized, hyd
Re:One step closer to robot world domination (Score:4, Interesting)
"Only sad part is that in Japan those are evolving for peaceful reasons whereas in USofA for military purposes. "
Japan thrives under the US conventional and nuclear military umbrella, hosts large US forces, and benefits from US militarism while maintaining a peaceful image of moral superiority. The Japanese military itself is rather impressive, but discreet.
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Re:One step closer to robot world domination (Score:5, Interesting)
The GP forgets, too, that for all of known history peace has been held by the hands of a ruthless, iron-fisted dictator.
And, as far as military dictators go, the USA is a teddy bear.
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So it's ok if the humans lives are lost only on the opposing side ? What if you're the aggressor ? What if both sides have robots ? If one side is defeated, what happens then ? Are these military robots going to run the occupation government, or just slaughter all humans ?
If there is no risk to your human forces in a war, there is no reason to avoid war. Do you think nuclear weapons have been unused for a half
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I do look forward to the robots that can land on their feet after you kick them in the head hard enough to make them spend some time upside down. Those will be cool. They'll show people how to do Kung Fu scenes...
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Re:One step closer to robot world domination (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard it's due to demographic pressure and xenophobia. The Japanese birthrate is declining and they don't like foreigners. With fewer workers and no outside source they have to increasingly mechanize their factories.
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