4 ms·
It's hard to find practical applications for walking. The vast majority of environments in which mobile robots can be useful also have smooth floors. Legs have
by tlb 8y ago
It's hard to find practical applications for walking. The vast majority of environments in which mobile robots can be useful also have smooth floors. Legs have higher cost, weight, failure rate, and power consumption than wheels.
Better gripping, though, has immediate practical applications in manufacturing and distribution. We're much more likely to see that in use in the near future.
- vntok 8y agoStairs.
- Symmetry 8y agoMost buildings have to have affordances for people in wheelchairs and robots can use those. Hopefully in the future there will be standard robot/elevator interfaces but in the meantime we can make due - I spent a lot of time at my last job integrating elevators with our delivery robots.
- hugs 8y agoNext month I'll be going on a weeklong backpacking+camping trip. I don't believe in the notion that modern camping is "roughing" it (tents and shoes and cooking gear are essential tech). So on that note, I'd love to have a low-cost solar-rechargable "pack mule" robot that could carry more gear. (I'll survive without it, of course, but it would be nice.) Wheels on a robot wouldn't work where I'm going, but legs would.
- sgillen 8y agoYup, the military has this exact same use case, I think that's where all the funding for Boston dynamics big dog (and probably others) came from in the first place.
- hugs 8y agoI'll know I'm living in the future when I can buy a BigDog at REI.
- candiodari 8y agoThat's never going to happen for the same reason there aren't any photosynthesizing animals : you just don't get the required power output. A human walking uses about 80 Watts [1]. Assuming no losses that requires a 1/3 m2 solar panel (a perfect one, constantly in full sunlight) to just move during the day. So count on needing 2/3 m2 at the very least. And while robotics have advanced, there is no robot I know of that uses less than 300 or so watts. I think you're right though that there is a market for very large, very heavy vehicles with legs, for where slopes are either too steep, or the region just doesn't have roads. Such vehicles exist, but humans just can't control 4 legged vehicles. It quickly ends in disaster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+power+output+per+square+meter https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+power+output+per+squar...