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I can’t believe it’s more practical to use a robot quadruped than a rover with big soft tyres. This is cool but it’s gonna be a maintenance nightmare.
by taneq 2y ago
I can’t believe it’s more practical to use a robot quadruped than a rover with big soft tyres. This is cool but it’s gonna be a maintenance nightmare.
- bee_rider 2y agoIt looks like a university project? These usually start with Step 1: I would like to have a cool robot. Step 2: How do I plausibly justify cool robot? Everyone knows cool robots have legs, not wheels.
- taneq 2y agoExactly. A project from a legged robotics research group, no less. Wheels or tracks would be boringly pragmatic in comparison.
- dylan604 2y agoI don't know, Curiosity, Perseverance, Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity are all pretty cool. Perseverance even had a helicopter robot buddy. No legs. Just wheels. You might need to tweak your "cool" setting. You might be too aggressively filtering out some cool things
- bee_rider 2y agoThey get automatic cool points by virtue of being launched to another planet.
- fhd2 2y agoThe article mentions stair climbing as a requirement, not sure I buy that. Even wheeled robots can climb stairs with the right platform, I think that's still cheaper, less complex and error prone. But from a pragmatic perspective, it sounds like a very reasonable tradeoff to simply not support stair climbing. It's not like that thing is gonna walk itself from the workshop to the target area. If someone has to carry it anyway, they could conceivably carry it down some stairs while at it. (I'm a rather incompetent hobbyist when it comes to robotics, but I've been researching locomotion quite a bit and find a wheeled platform to be a good choice even in the forest environments I focus on. Guess it's just not exciting enough.)
- kleiba 2y agoThe article mentions stair climbing as a requirement, not sure I buy that. Agreed. That requirement seems to be at odds with the premise of cleaning up beaches.
- cowsandmilk 2y ago1. Stair climbing isn’t just about movement from top to bottom. Stairs are a common place where people drop litter. Cleaning litter on the stairs isn’t accomplished by carrying the robot down the stairs. 2. Why do you believe the robot will always have a minder? The objective very much would be setting these off from a central location and covering a whole neighborhood or city.
- fhd2 2y agoIf the point is to clean beaches and that's it, I think my points hold. Sure, there are stairs on some beaches, but it's not really any significant percentage of the space to be cleaned up, thus not really worth optimising for IMHO. If the point is to _start_ with beaches and to then use the same platform to clean up all kinds of yet to be determined areas, a quadruped might indeed be one of the few viable options. Wheeled robots can climb stairs with the right platform, but I wouldn't argue they can traverse arbitrary terrain the way quadrupeds can. Personally, when designing robots, I have very clear tasks and constraints in mind, making conscious tradeoffs. But I'm a software developer, that's how we do things. It's perhaps not how professional roboticists do things.
- LtWorf 2y agoWell it works on stairs…
- ryaneager 2y ago> The challenge is that most of that automation relies on mobility systems with wheels, which won’t work on the many beautiful beaches (and many beautiful flights of stairs) of Genoa. From the 3rd paragraph. Also Spot is an already developed robot platform, and it’s much simpler to use that than make a robot from scratch.
- pcrh 2y agoI suspect the project has broader goals, but presenting it as solving a problem familiar to most (i.e. litter) is mostly for the exposure that would bring.