Will the Headless Ape Robot Win the DARPA Challenge? 37
New submitter pausz42 writes "The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Stanford University are promoting RoboSimian, a simian-inspired robot able to face environments which are hostile for men. In the DARPA Robotics Challenge the selected teams have to develop an autonomous robot able to get into a car, drive it to a disaster site and perform hazardous activities. While this prototype is the only one that that doesn't have a humanoid shape (and it's quite creepy, since it does not have a head), it seems that its three fingered limbs are better fitted for some of the difficult tasks required by the DARPA challenge."
No neck != headless (Score:3, Interesting)
Just paint a smiley on it :)
IEEE video was underwhelming at first but then it quickly got extremely impressive: that's a very nice design they've got there, way more than is at first apparent. Only thing lacking is bouncing, jumping, and speed and it would fully live up to it's name.
However the hand fingers need both individual base individual centre axis rotation as well as individual common centre axis rotation, the shown offset 2-1 grasp is good for some things, but an axially symmetric 1-1-1 is good for other things like picking up small objects like nuts (the metal kind) or small stones, and a linear 1-1-1 is good for picking up bars and tubes without chasing them all over the place (the human hand does this differently and imperfectly).