Collaborate Disseminate
The walking tank concept has always captured imaginations. Whether you’re talking about the AT-AT walkers of Star Wars, or the Dreadnoughts from Warhammer 40,000, they are often portrayed in fiction …read more Continue reading Why Walking Tanks Never Became A Thing
AI agents are learning to do all kinds of interesting jobs, even the creative ones that we quite prefer handling ourselves. Nevertheless, technology marches on. Working in this area is …read more Continue reading AI Learns To Walk in 3D Training Grounds
The whole idea behind virtual reality is that you don’t really know what’s going on in the world around you. You only know what your senses tell you is there. …read more Continue reading Virtual Reality Experiment Tricks Your Feet Into Walking While Sitting Down
Humans make walking look simple, but of course that’s an illusion easily shattered by even small injuries. Losing the ability to walk has an enormous impact on every part of your day, so rehabilitative advances are nothing short of life-changing. The Open Exosuit for Differently Abled project is working feverishly …read more
Continue reading Open Exosuit Project Helps Physically Challenged Put One Foot in Front of Another
[Project Malaikat] is a 3D printed hybrid bipedal walker and quadcopter robot, but there’s much more to it than just sticking some props and a flight controller to a biped and calling it a day. Not only is it a custom design capable of a careful but deliberate two-legged gait, but the props are tucked away and deployed on command via some impressive-looking linkages that allow it to transform from walking mode to flying mode.
Creator [tang woonthai] has the 3D models available for download (.rar file) and the video descriptions on YouTube contain a bill of materials, but beyond …read more
Continue reading Hybrid Robot Walks, Transforms, And Takes Flight
Wearables and robots don’t often intersect, because most robots rely on rigid bodies and programming while we don’t. Exoskeletons are an instance where robots interact with our bodies, and a soft exosuit is even closer to our physiology. Machine learning is closer to our minds than a simple state machine. The combination of machine learning software and a soft exosuit is a match made in heaven for the Harvard Biodesign Lab and Agile Robotics Lab.
Machine learning studies a walker’s steady gait for twenty periods while vitals are monitored to assess how much energy is being expended. After watching, the …read more
If you’re working on your own bipedal robot, you don’t have to start from the ground up anymore. [Ted Huntington]’s Two Leg Robot project aims to be an Open Source platform that’ll give any future humanoid-robot builders a leg up.
While we’ve seen quite a few small two-legged walkers, making a pair of legs for something human-sized is a totally different endeavor. [Ted]’s legs are chock-full of sensors, and there’s a lot of software that processes all of the data. That’s full kinematics and sensor info going back and forth from 3D model to hardware. Very cool. And to top …read more
There are a lot of ways to try to mathematically quantify how healthy a person is. Things like resting pulse rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygenation are all quite simple to measure and can be used to predict various clinical outcomes. However, one you may not have considered is gait velocity, or the speed at which a person walks. It turns out gait velocity is a viable way to predict the onset of a wide variety of conditions, such as congestive heart failure or chronic obtrusive pulmonary disease. It turns out, as people become sick, elderly or infirm, they tend …read more
[Basti] was playing around with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and decided that a lot of the “hello world” type programs just weren’t zingy enough to instill his love for the networks in others. So he juiced it up a little bit by applying a reasonably simple ANN to teach a four-legged robot to walk (in German, translated here).
While we think it’s awesome that postal systems the world over have been machine sorting mail based on similar algorithms for years now, watching a squirming quartet of servos come to forward-moving consensus is more viscerally inspiring. Job well done! Check out …read more
Continue reading Train Your Robot To Walk with a Neural Network
UCLA’s Robots and Mechanics Lab thinks it found an elegant solution to the bipedal robot problem. Continue reading Bipedal Robots Are Better at Walking Sideways
