Dexter Walks (first dynamically balancing biped robot)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
The way humans walk is exactly the opposite. The toes are at a different angle from the foot (when walking), so that our feet effectively look something like ___/ , with the underscores being the foot and the / being the toes. We then transition from the ___ part of the foot to the / part of the foot and push forward, and land flat footed with the other foot. For whatever speed you are going, there is a proper ratio between landing on the ___ part of the foot and pushing off the / part of the foot, and that's where balance comes from. That is, the faster the acceleration of the fall, the faster you transition from ___ to / .
So in humans, balance comes from the way one step connects to the next step, whereas Dexter appears to be treating each step as a discrete unit, where it has to attain balance at the end of one step before going on to the next step.
If you actually have to balance yourself after each individual step instead of using the next step for balance, the problem seems in some ways to be much harder.
Also, the balance problem is greatly compounded by the small steps Dexter takes. Compare this to doing lunges. When you do a lunge, you basically take a long stride forward and then sink into it, all while keeping your torso perfectly upright. This gives you a much bigger platform for stability. As terrain gets steeper, the way humans walk becomes more like a lunge for this reason.
So my guess is that taking one tiny step and then balancing is the hardest part of this problem, because you have the least tools at your disposal. For example, you can't use the next step to balance you. However, once you can do the last step of the sequence, all the preceding steps working backward from the last one get progressively easier.
I don't know anything about robotics, but as an athlete and sports physiology geek I find the problem interesting.
I doubt that. I don't think that would qualify as dynamic balance. Remember, it's only been a couple of weeks since Dexter's first step -- he's walking quite well.
This is one of those situations where the approach bounds the eventual utility. There are a lot of non-dynamically balanced robots that would just blow the minds of researchers from 20 years ago, but they are still limited.
By solving the dynamic balance problem, even though to the untrained eye it may currently look less impressive than some other systems, there's no more ceiling to what it can do, dynamically (control-wise, not accounting for power density). All of the behaviours you mentioned can be implemented on top of this substrate.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go prepare my bunker for the coming War with the Machines.
Here, for instance: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Joel/footstep/videos.html#ASIMO
It would help to know more about exactly what Dexter is doing, so I can find some similar stuff. There is a large amount of literature on the subject.
Also, you note that Asimo's floor has to be hard and flat-- generally true, but also true for most bipeds, which seems to include Dexter. Can Dexter really deal with irregular terrain? How irregular can it be? An interesting question is how to get a biped to walk on *really* irregular terrain, like boulder-size.
http://www.plyojump.com/movies/qrio/sdr-4x_recoverfromfall.mpg