This 15-foot tall mech weighs 8,000 lbs and can run 20 mph
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
There have been many fast-running robots. Boston Dynamics gets the most press, but there are others. I have an old patent on this from the early 1990s. It seems quite possible to do much better at legged running than people are doing, but there's no market and it's too expensive for the toy market. The Marines rejected the Legged Squad Support System, the militarized version of BigDog.
If you're going to build a big four-legged machine, it would be interesting to do it with double-ended air cylinders. Then you have adjustable compliance and energy recovery. A muscle can be thought of as a spring with an adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. Humans get back about 70% of running energy as elastic recovery. Cheetahs, about 90%. So energy recovery is crucial to fast running.
It's hard to implement that mechanically (there are mechanical kludges that do it, but not very well) but straightforward pneumatically. Carrying an engine and air compressor is usually too bulky for mobile robots, but in truck size, it would work. The control problem is different. You have to work in force space, not position space. It's not a good exoskeleton system, but it's a good robot.
When Google bought all those robotics companies, I was expecting great things. But nothing happened. Top management lost interest. Last year, Google sold off Boston Dynamics and Schaft to Softbank. Maybe they'll do something.
It's quite do-able today. When I was working on this in the early 1990s, gyros were big and expensive, as were accelerometers. Getting enough mobile compute power was hard. Nobody had 3D sensing good enough to profile terrain. Batteries were still NiCd. Motors were weaker. Power MOSFETs were bulkier and more troublesome. All those hardware problems have been solved. There's also been a lot of progress in control theory. Back then, it was mostly PID. Adaptive feedforward control was exotic and rare. Now advanced control is common. It takes smartphone levels of CPU power, which is a non-problem today.
But there's still no market.
The point of running and walking is simply that driving only works on sufficiently flat surfaces and is only efficient if the friction of that can be reduced, e.g. using flattening and asphalt. Running on sand or snow or otherwise loose underground, with big feet to distribute weight, is always going to be more efficient than rolling, we just can't control such systems.
But try doing a safari. A 6 hour drive across "flat" savannah, after which you look at the map and see you've travelled 30km, and used up something 1-2% of the lifespan of the 4x4 you were in (axle will need replacement after 50-70 such rides because it'll be shocked to pieces), that ride will cure you of the notion that driving is efficient.
And that's flat savannah, really, on photographs it looks really flat an driveable. And at the height of the dry season there are areas where that's even kind of true. Not many though. When you think about other biomes like forests, rocky mountainous areas, swamps (or really anything even a bit wetter than dry savannah, like almost all of Western Europe). Without roads, cars go nowhere.
But after dozens of billions of dollars of infrastructure investment per state, it can be tolerably efficient in densely populated areas. Even such efforts unlock something like 20% of the state at best.
Most people just happen to have spent their entire life in such an area and then extrapolate their direct experience to cover everything.
Then there's "reach". The truth is, even in dense cities, specifically built for car traffic, walkers can reach far more locations than cars ever will, even the smallest most agile car you've ever seen. And even there you see people using power equipment costing millions to compensate for the fact that cars, vans, ... can't navigate something like a building site.
Walkers are the future, at some point.
A hummer weighs 2000lbs less and can go well over 80mph, what benefit does this concept have over armored cars?
Can go where no hummer has gone before ?
May also help firefighter carry heavy load for forest fire.
Because my inner child wants to pilot a giant robot, and that's that.
Add one more "tech level" to it and you can have a 1-on-1 mapping of the user's input and this allows you to have tanks that require almost no training to use allowing you to have your infantry be... well, big robots. The only advantage of that is if you can produce them faster than training would take.
In real life, right now, they simply looks cool.
excessively deep voice narrator - tick.
15 seconds of content stretched to a 2 minute video - tick.
weak cgi - tick.
overly dramatic music - tick.
people striking heroic poses - tick.
and "XMech Racing League"? really?
What's so special about it?
Cue guy putting on aviators