3 ms·
Why four legs? Once the expense of four has been invested is there a better number, say six or eight, to have? I can imagine all sorts of advantages and disad
by worik 3y ago
Why four legs?
Once the expense of four has been invested is there a better number, say six or eight, to have?
I can imagine all sorts of advantages and disadvantages. They choose four, is that because four is best? Or because a dog has four?
- anamexis 3y agoI am also curious about educated answers to this question, but I imagine taking a cue from millions of years of evolutionary pressure is a pretty solid bet.
- fbdab103 3y agoEvolutionary technical debt is a thing. Many local optimum were locked into the gene pool due to random chance.
- makeitdouble 3y ago8 legs are also well representated and going strong for millions of years, not to mention carcinisation being a meme at this point. When it comes to robotics, my best guess would be cost and complexity. We also either need a better control interface or better self driving software to take advantage of the legs moving independently (I assume optimizing how the 8 legs should move to climb a rocky path for instance is just a computational nightmare to do realtime)
- taneq 3y agoLegs are expensive. You need at at least three high performance actuators plus position sensing etc. Each leg also adds weight and power drain. Two is way hard. Six or more is also hard if you want to do it properly over rough terrain. Four is a sweet spot for human-scale robots.