4 ms·

What kind of advances do we need to make for robots of this size to have the kind mobility that people would generally expect?

saalweachter 7y ago
About ten years of lowering people's expectations for how mobile a 15-ton robot should be.
myself248 7y ago
Financing. MegaBots was founded by a couple of controls engineers who had done the math and figured they could make a real bipedal walking mecha with current technology, if only someone else would fund it. Not that much money materialized, also falling on your face hurts when your face started 15 feet in the air, so the current gen went with a tracked base instead. But the tech can be done, we just need to get the pilots out and the money raised.
- Animats 7y ago
  There's no market. You can build it, but so far, they don't come. Honda's Asimo. Boston Dynamics's Atlas. Schaft's humanoid (probably the best one to date). Deere's legged logging machine. All never got beyond a few prototypes. None of them work well enough to do anything useful. I used to work on this stuff, back in the 1990s. I have two patents in that area. (The big insight is that legs are for traction control - you can mess with the contact normal in useful ways. As soon as you get off flat terrain, traction control dominates the problem.) I could never see a market for legged machines. Too expensive for toys. Not useful enough for much else. Boston Dynamics has gone from sugar daddy to sugar daddy for decades - first DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. Today, they finally launched a product, their cute little all-electric Spot robot.[1] No price given. [1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot
  - kortex 7y ago
    It's still too expensive vs the gained utility. Given a tradeoff of very expensive and finnicky hardware, vs offroad wheels, use animals, or just pay humans, the robot loses. A big part of that cost is the drive train and transmission. You need low speed and tons of torque, so this usually means geardowns. Not that the software NRE costs are trivial, but they can be amortized. But building even a single basic six axis arm with human comparable strength is gonna cost several grand.
  - smokelegend 7y ago
    2019 Atlas... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E
    - goldenkey 7y ago
      That thing is nightmare fuel. What kind of power in voltage/amps is it on? With fusion technology, the iron man fuel cell will pretty much actually exist. Think about how much more capable these things would be with higher energies..
    - Animats 7y ago
      That's very nice. They finally got a more general control model. That's progress. The first flip from that crowd was two decades ago. Now they have a way of generating and following more complex motions. "80% success", they write, so there's a ways to go yet. I wonder what they use for actuators. What you want for running and gymnastics is a spring with adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. A pneumatic cylinder can do that, and can store energy briefly between motions. Humans, when running, recover about 60%-70% of energy from stride to stride. (Cheetahs, 90%. That's how they run so fast.) Hydraulics can't do that very well, although there have been some attempts with hydraulic accumulators. There have been attempts to do this mechanically, with two motors and a spring, but they're bulky. Direct drive electric motors can do it, but if you have a gear train, the inertia of the motor is multiplied by the reduction ratio and you lose the ability to absorb shock loads. Also tend to break gear teeth. ("You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - early electric locomotive selling point.) I once thought that direct drive linear motors [1] were going to be the answer, but those never got popular. (Aura, the main company in that field, had some nice technology and a big financial scandal. Their web site looks like a placeholder now. It's one of those areas where hard problem + limited demand -> no products.) There's a hack called a 'series elastic actuator', which is a powered screw jack with a stiff spring on the end, used to fake more general springs. When absorbing energy, the motor runs fast to back off the screw jack and unload the stiff spring. This recovers no energy; it uses power when absorbing energy. It's used in research robots where battery life isn't an issue. It took Boston Dynamics about $120 million to get to the "legged squad support system", the militarized Big Dog. No idea how much it took to get to a usable Atlas. It's good that they're still trying. The question is how much patience and money Softbank has left. I wish Schaft had made it. They were a University of Tokyo spinoff, bought by Google and dumped by Google. They used small liquid-cooled motors, so they could run the motors much harder than usually done. Like Tesla's motors, but far smaller. [1] http://www.aurasystems.com/actuators.html http://www.aurasystems.com/actuators.html
manigandham 7y ago
Materials science so that they can be built from composites and weigh 1/10th of their current mass, and also take some hits. Otherwise it requires ridiculous amounts of energy to get any kind of real velocity in the movements, and then the first impact would explode both robots.
bArray 7y ago
I would say that you're barking up the wrong tree. It's really about cost of investment vs return on investment. 15 tonne robots still cost too much to build, transport, run, etc. Therefore, they have no competitors, because everybody else did the same napkin math but realized it wouldn't work. That's not to say that something like this isn't possible, the size simply needs to be reduced. Remove the human from the inside and then your robots can also deal proper blows.

saalweachter 7y ago

About ten years of lowering people's expectations for how mobile a 15-ton robot should be.

myself248 7y ago

Financing. MegaBots was founded by a couple of controls engineers who had done the math and figured they could make a real bipedal walking mecha with current technology, if only someone else would fund it. Not that much money materialized, also falling on your face hurts when your face started 15 feet in the air, so the current gen went with a tracked base instead. But the tech can be done, we just need to get the pilots out and the money raised.

Animats 7y ago
There's no market. You can build it, but so far, they don't come. Honda's Asimo. Boston Dynamics's Atlas. Schaft's humanoid (probably the best one to date). Deere's legged logging machine. All never got beyond a few prototypes. None of them work well enough to do anything useful. I used to work on this stuff, back in the 1990s. I have two patents in that area. (The big insight is that legs are for traction control - you can mess with the contact normal in useful ways. As soon as you get off flat terrain, traction control dominates the problem.) I could never see a market for legged machines. Too expensive for toys. Not useful enough for much else. Boston Dynamics has gone from sugar daddy to sugar daddy for decades - first DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. Today, they finally launched a product, their cute little all-electric Spot robot.[1] No price given. [1] https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot
- kortex 7y ago
  It's still too expensive vs the gained utility. Given a tradeoff of very expensive and finnicky hardware, vs offroad wheels, use animals, or just pay humans, the robot loses. A big part of that cost is the drive train and transmission. You need low speed and tons of torque, so this usually means geardowns. Not that the software NRE costs are trivial, but they can be amortized. But building even a single basic six axis arm with human comparable strength is gonna cost several grand.
- smokelegend 7y ago
  2019 Atlas... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E
  - goldenkey 7y ago
    That thing is nightmare fuel. What kind of power in voltage/amps is it on? With fusion technology, the iron man fuel cell will pretty much actually exist. Think about how much more capable these things would be with higher energies..
  - Animats 7y ago
    That's very nice. They finally got a more general control model. That's progress. The first flip from that crowd was two decades ago. Now they have a way of generating and following more complex motions. "80% success", they write, so there's a ways to go yet. I wonder what they use for actuators. What you want for running and gymnastics is a spring with adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. A pneumatic cylinder can do that, and can store energy briefly between motions. Humans, when running, recover about 60%-70% of energy from stride to stride. (Cheetahs, 90%. That's how they run so fast.) Hydraulics can't do that very well, although there have been some attempts with hydraulic accumulators. There have been attempts to do this mechanically, with two motors and a spring, but they're bulky. Direct drive electric motors can do it, but if you have a gear train, the inertia of the motor is multiplied by the reduction ratio and you lose the ability to absorb shock loads. Also tend to break gear teeth. ("You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - early electric locomotive selling point.) I once thought that direct drive linear motors [1] were going to be the answer, but those never got popular. (Aura, the main company in that field, had some nice technology and a big financial scandal. Their web site looks like a placeholder now. It's one of those areas where hard problem + limited demand -> no products.) There's a hack called a 'series elastic actuator', which is a powered screw jack with a stiff spring on the end, used to fake more general springs. When absorbing energy, the motor runs fast to back off the screw jack and unload the stiff spring. This recovers no energy; it uses power when absorbing energy. It's used in research robots where battery life isn't an issue. It took Boston Dynamics about $120 million to get to the "legged squad support system", the militarized Big Dog. No idea how much it took to get to a usable Atlas. It's good that they're still trying. The question is how much patience and money Softbank has left. I wish Schaft had made it. They were a University of Tokyo spinoff, bought by Google and dumped by Google. They used small liquid-cooled motors, so they could run the motors much harder than usually done. Like Tesla's motors, but far smaller. [1] http://www.aurasystems.com/actuators.html http://www.aurasystems.com/actuators.html

manigandham 7y ago

Materials science so that they can be built from composites and weigh 1/10th of their current mass, and also take some hits. Otherwise it requires ridiculous amounts of energy to get any kind of real velocity in the movements, and then the first impact would explode both robots.

bArray 7y ago

I would say that you're barking up the wrong tree. It's really about cost of investment vs return on investment. 15 tonne robots still cost too much to build, transport, run, etc. Therefore, they have no competitors, because everybody else did the same napkin math but realized it wouldn't work. That's not to say that something like this isn't possible, the size simply needs to be reduced. Remove the human from the inside and then your robots can also deal proper blows.