Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Sweats | Hacker News Reader

Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Sweats

spectrum.ieee.org

269 pointsmcspecter50 comments

You can go the other way and add closed-loop cooling to a person http://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove-research-0... Apparently it's been commercialized already http://www.avacore.com/

These are used extensively in endurance automobile racing, and in desert racing. Keeps you much more alert, especially in hot environments.

Well, not the glove, but a shirt and or pants:

https://store.windingroad.com/fast-cool-suit-system---no-air...

I wear a cool shirt even for sprint races (30 minutes) - it can be 110 degrees at the track and the nomex fire suit gets hot.

Some surgeons also use active cooling systems. The patient is being actively warmed and the surgeon, gowned and gloved, is cooled. The anaesthesiologist is juuuust right.

Why would it help a surgeon to be cool? for the regular reason that everyone works better when at a comfortable temp or due to a specific medical reason?

Maybe so sweat doesn't get in their eyes? Just a guess though.

It gets hot under the sterile gown, cap, gloves, face mask. 12 hour surgery and it can get quite uncomfortable.

lots of lights in their work area too.

I would imagine being at the right body temperature also helps them keep their hands steady and not get itchy or twitchy.

Thus you can avoid a second worker focusing into remove your sweat regularly and stopping the surgeon "flow".

Fighting against contagious diseases would be much easier if you don't feel the urge to remove your mask each five seconds.

Respect to the robot, what about aluminium oxides?

MIT folks also working on the same problem: http://www.embrlabs.com/

This is brilliant. Evaporative cooling is extremely efficient, and the use of laser sintered aluminum in the support structure to facilitate it is flat out genius. It's like we're living in the future.

I'm really amused by the artistic pointlessness of a robot doing push-ups.

It's not pointless. It's a familiar enough exercise that people can get a realistic idea of the energy expenditure this robot could be expected to perform in the field with the right control software.

We humans look smart when we manage to create a bad copy of a tiny part of nature. How small we are.

I know! And isn't that just the greatest?! Look at just how much more we have to learn and do!

To be fair, nature had a 3.5 billion year head start.

And an entire earth and no concept of animal rights.

And we're still beating it in some ways! Sintered aluminium bones with nonuniform porosity to optimize evaporation? Fuckin' metal.

But heavier than bone. And about 50% of all instances are distributed factories.

Regular bones are also structure with non-uniform porosity. But to optimize something like strength-to-weight ratio by reinforcing areas under the most stress. http://classes.mst.edu/civeng120/lessons/composite/materials...

I think that's about as fair as saying "No, those three lines of code is actually millions of lines of code". After all, it's arbitrary wherever you set the cut off (e.g. it's worth noting that human level intelligence wasn't first invented by humans).

We're nature in recursion!

Ah, but unlike nature we get to use intelligent design!

And, we came up with an emulation of a product of billions of years of evolution in this case.

In the case of intelligence, there is plenty of "randomness." And in the case of evolution, there is plenty of..well, something beyond randomness.

This can also be seen as tight constraints leading to convergent evolution. There's nothing shameful in recognizing when something else's invention is relevant to your needs.

This. It's not that nobody thought of evaporative cooing before. It just didn't make sense within the constraints in the prior cases when it was considered. Water methanol (or any other fuel but you pretty much only see it used this way with water methanol) injection in combustion engines makes a large part of its performance impact through evaporative cooling. That's more than half century old technology but it was applied in a different situation. I would have never thought of using a porous alloy to deliver coolant like that but that's also way outside my area of expertise.

This isn't very amazing. It's more of a "congratulations on finding a novel way to solve the problem utilizing the resources available, now produce it at scale". All sorts of cool things can be done in a lab if you've got modern manufacturing techniques at your disposal and a pile of cash. Scaling at a reasonable price point is the hard part.

Machines fall flat in many aspects: They don't heal, reproduce or "survive" well without human help in any way. Then again, they do things that are impossible with organic systems, like going to space, travelling at supersonic speeds or lifting hundreds of tonnes in one go. That's why technology has always been an extension of ourselves, but now we're taking the first steps to bring these different lines together. That will of course lead to some awkward in-betweens, which nature has produced as well (see the tully monster for example).

> (see the tully monster for example).

Wow, that looks like something straight out of Spore! [1] Thanks for mentioning this! Weird creatures like these on our own planet only pique the excitement for seeing how truly alien life on other planets must be like.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Tullimon...

Looks like something straight out of H.P. Lovecraft's works. Even the description on the Wikipedia page is pretty Lovecraftian.

Nature has had a lot longer than we have. And its first few years weren't that impressive either.

We're copying useful features while avoiding copying the bad parts. This robot's not going to get cancer or die of old age, and we can replace its limbs with a screwdriver.

> We're copying useful features while avoiding copying the bad parts. This robot's not going to get cancer or die of old age, and we can replace its limbs with a screwdriver.

Well, it won't get cancer, but the memory will suffer bitflips over time and tin whiskers will eventually cause shorts. It will also stop working at some point, like all machinery.

Not really disputing that this is impressive. But mechanical systems just have different longetivity problems than biological ones.

Tin whiskers are largely a solved problem. Conformal coatings or just plain plating prevents them from growing: http://www.ipc.org/feature-article.aspx?aid=Effective-Tin-Wh...

not everything in nature is very smart, like vestibular system in the inner ear, so easy to temper with. Actually human can make far more cool things than that.

Just tacking on a few more things about our "original equipment":

(1) built with "unskilled" labor (2) uses commonly-available materials and energy sources (3) integrated self-defense systems against hostile nanotechnology (4) automatic repair system, automatically reconfigures to adapt to certain load profiles (5) some not-yet-matched strength-vs-weight profiles (6) self-lubricating (7) serviceable "in place"

Either part tends to fail after about 40 years of use though. Evolution is a harsh mistress.

Replacements are very costly and hard.

"The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which had not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural."

- j.b.s haldane 1924 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus;_or,_Science_and_the_...

Being as it's early in the morning and I'm still blurry-eyed, I thought the headline read 'Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Swears.' Now that would have been an interesting article to have read!

Those are some really crummy push ups. Get your chest down to the floor, Private!

I wonder how effective the micro-porous aluminum is at transferring heat from a cooling fluid to a heat sink. That might be useful even in active, non-evaporative cooling systems.

Isn't heat transfer very closely tied to surface area (among other things)?

That's my thinking - so this should have crazy surface area.

You could make some really awesome aluminum parts. Create a dense exterior with some interior "strut" infill structure and a very porous fill and put plumbing fixtures on the ends. Super strong, lightweight parts that you can cool at crazy rates. I wonder if this would work for aerospace? IIRC cooling the components exposed to exhaust can be a big limitation.

Oh man, keeping the flow laminar over all those transfer surfaces, and of course increasing the work because of the obstructions to flow...so many fun engineering problems!!

Exactly, they don't provide measurements and comparisons, for example I'd love to know the temperature spike of the motors when it's cooled and when it's not (e.g. when they have to programmatically stop it because it risks overheating). Active motors still work at ~ 100°℃, can't they?

There's a lot of (unfortunately) classified knowledge in this area. For example the SR-71 used its fuel as a coolant -- they had a lot of crazy thermal problems (that they worked out on slide rules!)

Rocket engines have been probing these kind of technologies for decades, and it's been proposed for re-entry vehicles too. Called transpiration cooling. Only more recently, with additive manufacturing, it's become a lot cheaper to integrate into the structures. I haven't read of anyone actually using it.

As soon as I saw the robot's face mask I knew it was going to be Japan.

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