MegaBots calls it a day, puts fighting robot up for sale on eBay
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Like going bigger every year, etc.
This could have led to an evolutionary path to big bots with good mobility.
There were some flippers, some hammers, some flamethrowers, but spinning really fast always tore into them instantly. Kinda made it boring after the first few seasons.
I'd be on board again if there wasn't such an obvious winning strategy. They banned nets, but they should probably ban spinners as well.
For the most part, nobody is insane enough to battle autonomous robots with destructive weapons on board.
Ablative spinner shields are too heavy, and get in your way as much as they get in the spinner's way.
IIRC good pushers could still compete with spinners though.
MegaBots was founded by a couple of controls engineers who had done the math and figured they could make a real bipedal walking mecha with current technology, if only someone else would fund it.
Not that much money materialized, also falling on your face hurts when your face started 15 feet in the air, so the current gen went with a tracked base instead. But the tech can be done, we just need to get the pilots out and the money raised.
Honda's Asimo. Boston Dynamics's Atlas. Schaft's humanoid (probably the best one to date). Deere's legged logging machine. All never got beyond a few prototypes. None of them work well enough to do anything useful.
I used to work on this stuff, back in the 1990s. I have two patents in that area. (The big insight is that legs are for traction control - you can mess with the contact normal in useful ways. As soon as you get off flat terrain, traction control dominates the problem.)
I could never see a market for legged machines. Too expensive for toys. Not useful enough for much else. Boston Dynamics has gone from sugar daddy to sugar daddy for decades - first DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. Today, they finally launched a product, their cute little all-electric Spot robot.[1] No price given.
A big part of that cost is the drive train and transmission. You need low speed and tons of torque, so this usually means geardowns.
Not that the software NRE costs are trivial, but they can be amortized. But building even a single basic six axis arm with human comparable strength is gonna cost several grand.
I wonder what they use for actuators. What you want for running and gymnastics is a spring with adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. A pneumatic cylinder can do that, and can store energy briefly between motions. Humans, when running, recover about 60%-70% of energy from stride to stride. (Cheetahs, 90%. That's how they run so fast.) Hydraulics can't do that very well, although there have been some attempts with hydraulic accumulators. There have been attempts to do this mechanically, with two motors and a spring, but they're bulky. Direct drive electric motors can do it, but if you have a gear train, the inertia of the motor is multiplied by the reduction ratio and you lose the ability to absorb shock loads. Also tend to break gear teeth. ("You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" - early electric locomotive selling point.) I once thought that direct drive linear motors [1] were going to be the answer, but those never got popular. (Aura, the main company in that field, had some nice technology and a big financial scandal. Their web site looks like a placeholder now. It's one of those areas where hard problem + limited demand -> no products.)
There's a hack called a 'series elastic actuator', which is a powered screw jack with a stiff spring on the end, used to fake more general springs. When absorbing energy, the motor runs fast to back off the screw jack and unload the stiff spring. This recovers no energy; it uses power when absorbing energy. It's used in research robots where battery life isn't an issue.
It took Boston Dynamics about $120 million to get to the "legged squad support system", the militarized Big Dog. No idea how much it took to get to a usable Atlas.
It's good that they're still trying. The question is how much patience and money Softbank has left.
I wish Schaft had made it. They were a University of Tokyo spinoff, bought by Google and dumped by Google. They used small liquid-cooled motors, so they could run the motors much harder than usually done. Like Tesla's motors, but far smaller.
Otherwise it requires ridiculous amounts of energy to get any kind of real velocity in the movements, and then the first impact would explode both robots.
That's not to say that something like this isn't possible, the size simply needs to be reduced. Remove the human from the inside and then your robots can also deal proper blows.
Let me introduce you to the present https://www.robomaster.com/en-US https://www.twitch.tv/robomaster/videos FPV controlled, computer vision oriented, AI enhanced (gun controllers/target tracking is fully automated).
I cannot vouch for this being high quality TV but the spinning meta was broken somehow. There are still a number of spinners, but other designs do OK (drums, flippers, combinations of these things, even some flamethrower bots).
On that note I can vouch for this being highly entertaining low quality TV, and with all the sponsorships and kids you see in the stands, I do hope it's helping to inspire a new generation of roboticists :)
Some of them are just toys to be destroyed by the better bots, many with little strategy. But getting one to work is still an achievement IMO. There’s just going to be a finite pool of talent to produce enough of them.
This makes me want to watch a battle again.
Can't wait for the RFS for "giant robots"
I spent about 1/3rd of that to build up a shaker table for heavy equipment, with nothing more than a 120HP electric hydraulic power pack and a pair of 120mm Parker hydraulic actuators, mechanical fabrication, civil engineering, associated servovalves, motion controllers, sensors, PLC/PC controls...etc. That was a static installation, not a vehicle, which costs more.
If I had to quote a competitor machine with a well-defined spec - this had none, so you're basically paying for a couple revisions of the design - I'd figure on the order of 1200 hours of mechanical engineering/CAD at $80/hr, 1600 hours of electrical engineering/programming at $100/hr, 2000 hours of skilled fabricator/machinist time at $40/hr, plus project management/purchasing/legal and other overhead, which puts you at close to $1M just in labor. It would be challenging to source the industrial lego that powers this thing for less than $1.5M; I expect that they're charging nothing for some of their labor, using cheaper materials (eg. start with used digger tracks instead of buying something off the shelf) to make this come out as low as $2.5M.
I'm sure he'll have some more cool and fun endeavors in the future. Will be keeping a lookout for his name!
Come on back for a visit, you'll find a welcoming community and tons of creative stuff going on.
Third, Eagle Prime has a lot of hydraulic hoses and connectors. During the course of operation, it will usually spring a hydraulic leak maybe every 4 hours or so of driving and crushing. So far, every leak we’ve been able to fix with a standard set of large wrenches and a replacement o-ring. I’ll include a bunch
https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480
15 tons!
Fun fact, apparently most construction equipment use the same keys [1] and the keys can be bought with no proof of ownership.
I owe my funds to the company bank
I thought when bankruptcy is inevitable, you'd want to wait for the final judgment before liquidating.
YouTube doesn't even like robot fights: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
They tried to add some excitement with commentary, but it didn't work.