Footage of giant RX-78 Gundam in Yokohama undergoing movement testing | Hacker News Reader

Footage of giant RX-78 Gundam in Yokohama undergoing movement testing

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45 pointsrefresher36 comments

AFAIK this is not intended to be free-standing. It is more like a large puppet held up at the waist.

Yes, as you can see if you watch carefully. That's disappointing. Legged locomotion technology is far enough along to make that work standalone. Maybe they could get Softbank to get them some consultants from Boston Dynamics. BD has gone to electric robots, so the people who did the hydraulic machines may be available.

If you didn't notice, most of the footage was shown at 4x speed, or 2x speed. It's extremely slow to move any part of this monstrosity. There is no way it would be capable of walking freely with the slowness of the mechanics. It's a completely different story at this scale, Boston Dynamics doesn't have a way to make that work.

Yes, even if they wanted to, making joints which can withstand such dynamic loads, while being small, and lightweight will be a giant engineering challenge.

60t static load, now imagine how big will it be when it walks.

It takes serious engineering. And it's been done.The Dragon, from Zollner Elektronik AG.[1] About a third of the size of Gundam, mostly so it could be transported by road. True quadruped. Best engineering in the giant robot space so far.

The Sultan's Elephant [2] was bigger, but less technically advanced. The headaches of transporting it were too much of a problem. Once your art project gets bigger than what can be moved by road or rail, there's a problem.

The Land Walker, from about 2006, was about a third of the size of the big Gundam. Biggest walking biped to date.[3]

There's also Eagle Prime, which is really a tracked vehicle.[4]

[1] https://youtu.be/qmbW5gvAX4U

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sultan%27s_Elephant

[3] https://www.metatube.com/es/videos/9905/LAND-WALKER-Japanese...

[4] https://youtu.be/ePINYZK4p5Y

None of the videos you linked to show any robots actually walking.

[1] - the dragon is rolled around on a wheeled platform. There is one clip of a leg lifting, but none of it actually walking.

[2] - The Sultan's Elephant is moved around on wheels. It doesn't walk.

[3] - That thing is "skating" around on wheels, again not actually walking.

[4] - And yet another machine that doesn't walk but actually rolls around on treads.

No, the Zollner dragon really walks.[1] Very slowly, and only one foot is off the ground at a time. Top speed 1.5mph.

The wheeled platform is for transport.

[1] https://youtu.be/MwiPe76yfzk

>Legged locomotion technology is far enough along to make that work standalone.

Says you?

well, this is the first step no?

Indeed, baby steps. At first I thought it was CGI because of the feet-induced cognitive dissonance but then I saw the waist-level support moving in the shadow behind.

Still fascinating to see this towering thing in motion. I was never into Gundam, but Macross Plus had me hooked, and this brings back memories such as this scene:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SMMRs5ZIqd0/

Those YF-19 and YF-21 are still the best { variable fighters U mecha } designs to my eyes: simple, elegant, believable, futuristic yet practical.

https://opuszine.us/_assets/stills/macross-plus.jpg

In hindsight there are so many anticipatory things in Macross Plus, it’s really good SF trying to reason from first principles: AR virtual canopies, neural link operated plane, deep AI generated musical arrangement from simple human composition, Kessler syndrome, drone vs human presence on the battlefield, overall human relevance in the face of emergent AGI...

what its it, 3 Stories tall?

18 metres tall 1:1 replica.

It is interesting to think of a future where wars between countries could be fought through duels between "champion robots" with no loss of innocent people's lives.

EDIT: I didn't expect this comment to be controversial/downvoted, and it is interesting that it is evoking some level of passive aggressive sarcasm.

This is the same idea as letting two sides play chess and see who wins.

It might work for trivial matters, but when the stakes are high and the chips are down human nature is always going to lead to force to get what is important.

"Ok so our robot beat your robot on some contrived fight. We're going to invade your country with a population of millions, take all of your money and possessions and force you all to work in the salt mines as slaves until you die an untimely and avoidable death. Please form an orderly line at the salt-death-mines tomorrow morning. This is totally fine since the robot your country sent to fight ours lost so you've just got to accept it without any resistance. Kthx Bai - signed your new overlords"

Well if our robots beat your robots in killing each other, the logical next step is that the robots would kill the human opponents. So it’s not quite like a contrived chess game if the humans are reasonably inferior fighting machines.

It’s more like proxy battles, and in real life we do this with expendable humans rather than robots. When a side decides to surrender it’s not necessarily when the last person is wiped out... usually done when the military is near or close to defeat.

OP is suggesting that one day robots could outclass flesh and bone humans so much that real humans will be like the women and children of past society that will not have to fight in real battles.

It’s already like that today. The robots are unmanned aircraft with missiles. The US kills a fair amount of people using this method, though it is not widely reported.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/14/122732/

I think it was Kissinger that said (paraphrasing) war is a tool to achieve political objectives. The necessity, scale and manner of violence depends on what those objectives are and feasibility of success.

The kind of political dilemma that would be solved by a mecha duel would probably not be the same one that requires invasion and enslavement in death mines.

Kissinger may have said it, but it dates back to, at least, Carl von Clausewitz. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz:

“Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.”

(“War is the mere continuation of politics with other means”)

I'm thinking a china vs. india epic dance battle would be a good way to address the border issue.

For cyprus, the greeks and turks could just speed up the music until some team loses the beat. Spratly islands could be sorted with synchronised swimming?

Bonus clips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twbuT1V5mFE&t=10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e2igZexpMs

I mean, this is kinda what the olympics does, right? Show off how good you are at making soldier-like people, celebrate some nationalism, acknowledge that the other countries are also humans capable of training good soldier-like people, and then everyone goes home and continues trading.

>Gundam

>no loss of people's lives

Sure...

If people have to spill their blood to make war there will be a lot less of them.

And even with robots, once you destroyed the enemy robots, what happens then if they don't surrender? Now your robots have to kill humans (or if you refuse you didn't achieve anything of consequence).

That sounds like G Gundam. https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Mobile_Fighter_G_Gundam

Reminds me of the story of the Roman Horatii and Curiatii who fought in a duel to the death in place of their home armies. So I guess there is historical president for it.

> So I guess there is historical president for it.

I think you'll find you mean 'precedent' :-)

USA vs Japan happened back in 2017.

Gundam are people too!

We could skip robots and use chess or better go.

Sounds more like Robot Jox than Gundam...

It's cool and all but... wasn't it made to be a project to show off at Olympics? The project seems to be fairly delayed if that's the case.

In any case, I really hope this project didn't receive ridiculous amount of funding. Japan used to be the absolute no 1 when it comes to robotics about 20 years ago, and have then been losing ground since. I hope the policy maker and people holding the money realize that it is far more valuable to take that lead back than create a big moving totem pole of the past that people can dance around.

oh man, thats pretty cool.

My wife would really enjoy seeing that.

I cannot help to lament in the lack of ambition from Japanese people nowadays.

They seem content with cute ideas which has little relevance to major global problems and tech advancement. They still have a top notch scientific and research system, and produce great results every year.

But they seem completely lost the drive for building the actual things that can affect people.

Put this in perspective, aside from a fan service, and commercial benefits, what’s the point of a actual size gundam model that can move?

Out of interest, since you’re in a mood to generalise, which nation’s people are worthy of your respect for their ambition and focus?

"There are only two things I can't stand in this world: People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcUs5X9glCc

The dutch only pretend to be tolerant so they can deviously spend all year learning your foibles and then remind you of them, at length and in company, come December.

https://stuffdutchpeoplelike.com/2015/11/20/no-53-sarcastic-...

    Burgermannetjes don't mind foreigners at all
    Because who could expect THEM to doe normaal?

(Grapje, natuurlijk! We owe dutchies a great deal: the Puritans were afraid their children would grow up too tolerant in the netherlands, and consequently hightailed it to the New World...)

Anyone like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Zuck, even Bill Gates...

Can you name 1 Japanese person who had similar ambition and commitment to large-scale projects?

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