Artificial muscles robotic arm with full range of motion [video]
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> forearm with hand [weighs] only 1 kg
That is slightly below a human forearm with a hand.
> This artificial muscles robotic arm is operated by water and consumes 200W at peak
The ideal consumption necessary to raise this 7 kg dumbbell by 1 meter in 1 second is 7 watts.
Human muscle is about 20% efficient, so it probably consumes about 35 watts. Almost a tenth the power.
A human arm can also achieve about double the maximum output of that robotic arm: for instance this crank[0] offers 400 W max, with a more typical 50 W sustained output.
> achieve human immortallity [sic] by transplanting the brain into the machine
That feels like a stretch, given the complex needs of a brain (not just in glucose fed through veins, but also immunity protection and so much more). Brain transplant into an organic body seems easier, and even that does not address the fact that brain cells themselves age.
Being just an order of magnitude away from biology that took millions of years to develop and evolve is really impressive in my eyes!
> That feels like a stretch, given the complex needs of a brain (not just in glucose fed through veins, but also immunity protection and so much more). Brain transplant into an organic body seems easier, and even that does not address the fact that brain cells themselves age.
That said, this is probably the more reasonable argument. Ideally, eventually we'll just find ways to prevent much of the cell damage with aging - initially it probably won't lead anywhere near "biological immortality" (so it's pretty likely that everyone reading this will die and will cease to exist), but at the very least it'll lead to better quality of life at the more advanced ages and less human suffering overall!
Definitely an area that should have anywhere from 10x-100x the resources that have been allotted to it currently. Of course, one can also dream about staving off the eventual and inescapable clutches of entropy, if that allows them to live without existential crises and dread sneaking up on them, as it does with me.
Regardless, even advancements in robotics are immensely useful, paving way to everything from improving the quality of life for those who've suffered accidents, are differently abled in various ways, or have other factors that otherwise make their lives more challenging.
As for robot transplants or even living transplants, unless you can connect back all of the nerve endings that map roughly to what the host body needs, it's likely that it'd be like being fully paralyzed. In that regard, cryonics would be a better bet, to preserve the human being until the medicine has advanced to the point where any ailments and such can be addressed. Of course, seeing how new and still fledgling (and niche) the industry is, it's unlikely that many if any of the people will ever actually be successfully revived, much like we can't unscramble the brains of mummies in tombs.
But hey, if nothing else, it's an interesting pursuit and the trans-humanism movement is always curious to behold. Who doesn't enjoy racking their brains, imagining engineering solutions to problems that no one would have even considered a century ago?
the intuition is that it's probably easier to figure out how to keep a brain alive than an entire body alive
You sure?
A HP is 75 Kg raised by 1 meter in 1 second (and is roughhy 750 W): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower
Raising 1/10th of the weight by same distance in the same time should be 1/10th of that i.e. 70-75 W.
force = 7kg times 10N/kg = 70N (roughly)
So yes, more like 70W
(I still doubt that the robotic arm can be almost twice as efficient as a human arm, however, so probably the 20% is not accurate or there is some other factor involved) .
[1] which I have no idea if correct even roughly
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7kg*1m*%289.8m%2Fs%5E2...
Maybe falls a little bit under the uncanny valley but with clothes on, I could see this achieving a pretty natural look to a prosthetic, plus this type of design seems more analog to an actual arm in terms of control.
I know that there is a long way for real-life use, and maybe I'm naive because I don't know all the caveats that need to solved to make it feasible, but this type of tech gives always puts a smile on my face.
Fingers are going to move from left to right but they don't have muscles yet. Metacarpal and left-to-right wrist movement are also blocked.
Edit: I am curious about what tech would be needed to bring this up to near par with a human arm.
Turns out, when you focus just on the devices which try to replicate both human likeness and emotional relate-ability (drop all the WALLe style cute but abstract ones), it's pretty linear based on how well that goal of emotional affect is achieved.
If interested, please contact us by e-mail: automaton.company@gmail.com
I work in robotics, specifically compliant and modular actuators, similar to the ones in the video.
As I see it, (and many others in the field) One of the biggest issues in robotics is a lack of good artificial muscles. The need for them is that in a robot which can work with people you want it to have both high enough force output and power density to actually move things, but you also want the robots arms to be back drivable; you want to be able to move its arms by an outside force. For welding robots you want the opposite, zero backdriving and zero backlash.
To get back-drivability, good torque and reasonable power density, you generally can’t use spinning electric motors. You need to hear them too much. This is why Boston dynamics use hydraulics. It’s also why Boston dynamics is unlikely to ever sell you an Atlas in its current form because those custom hydraulic actuators make the system so unreliable and expensive, even a mining or gas company would struggle to justify it.
The short and long of it is this: if you want a robot that can do the things humans can do, like play soccer and rock climbing and knitting, then you need muscles like humans have.
So you need artificial muscles. There are a lot of different ways of making them. [1] the issue is no published technology is able to give you want you need to make a good analogue of human muscles.
The muscles in the video are (correct me if I’m wrong) soft fluidic actuators. These actually have pretty good potential, especially compared to things like piezoelectric actuators. But when taking into account how you would actually put these in a real world robot, problems arise.
But the main downside is you need lots of pumps and tubing to make it work, and it has limited maximum stress and relatively low actuation bandwidth. In a nut shell, to make these strong enough to do much useful work, you need them to be really big, and that means they can’t move very fast. There is a reason you don’t see any commercially available robots with this kind of actuator.
I really hope this creator can make his system do what he has set out to achieve. And perhaps he will be the one to figure out a new kind of actuator which does tick all the right boxes.
Conflict of interest: The startup I work at is developing a commercial product using a new kind of artificial muscle. So my views may be coloured by that.
[1] See this paper for a good breakdown of artificial muscles: https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2019-10-12/7c/zhang2019.pdf?ran...
On the criticism, do you think more limited / lab-bound systems will help develop control technology in advance of better muscles?
Long answer: I think that the more minds there are working on this (or any other interesting) problem, the more progress will be made. And we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.
The field of robotics, and especially soft robotics like this, is so new and uncharted that individuals tinkering in their garage can and have made real advances for the field.
That said, really good control systems for these kinds of actuators are something very much lacking. The human nervous system, and in particular the vestibular system is so absurdly effective, efficient and complex all at the same time that it boggles my mind. Nothing anyone has ever designed has ever come close to that level of functionality. But to make a robot that can do human things, we need that level of functionality. We need to have really good proprioception which is integrated with force and feedback sensing.
To give an example; open a bag of potato chips and pull out a decent handful. Now eat the chips one by one out of your hand without dropping any and without using your other hand. I dare say you can probably do this, and without crushing the chips in your hand. You can feel just how much force to apply, you can feel where to place your fingers so that all the chips are held just so. You can make subtle adjustments after each chip is taken away.
There is no robot hand in the world that can do that simple task. Ask any arm amputee. And to get to that point, a lot of really difficult stuff has to be invented and worked out. I suspect this is a problem which will be solved piecemeal, over time, but much of the fundamental work in things like the mathematics of motion control, material science and compliant mechanisms will come from very well funded labs. If I had to guess, I give a 60% chance a robot can do the chip eating task within a 5 years. And 85% within 10 years. (Especially if the work of my team pays off)
Is the technology dealing with interfacing with the brain good enough, even if on the arm side it's not?
I can say that I’m a big fan of K. Eric Drexlers work and that you should read it if you want to know what the future will look like.
Strength is additive. Why can't you just add more smaller muscle fibers that work in concert? That's basically how real muscles work. This seems so obvious there must be something wrong with the idea.
Great question. And yes, you can have lots of smaller ones to do the work of a few larger ones. The strength (stress) comes essentially from the cross sectional area of the muscle (or bundle of). And no matter how thin you make the spaghetti, you still need an equivalent volume of it to get the same cross section, For a given length.
The reason speed, as in how many times a second you can make it contract and lengthen, is a limiting factor comes down to good old force = mass x acceleration. Want to make it go faster?then you need higher pressure. So now You have a lot of water you need to move at high pressure with very rapid acceleration. This means the scale of the pumping equipment gets prohibitive very rapidly.
Real muscles work at a fundamental level by a kind of ratcheting mechanism between proteins that pull each other together. This process can happen very quickly. Mammal muscles don’t need to pump lots of liquids around with high acceleration and velocity. So there is actually a lot less inertia from moving mass in real muscle.
Another issue I didn’t touch on in my earlier post is that this kind of muscle is very difficult to do strain and force sensing with. To make motion with this kind of actuator that is both rapid and smooth is extremely difficult and still an open problem.
But the problem remains that there is still a severe trade off between speed, force and backdriving. The Spot really doesn’t have that high of a max force it can generate, and no where near that of a similarly sized dog. Additionally, the motion produced by the kinematics system it uses it relatively simple with far fewer degrees of freedom than a real dog.
The general consensus in the field is that if you want to have a robot which can do everything a human can do, you need to at least match the degrees of freedom a human has in motion. It would be very difficult to fit 100+ harmonic drive servos into a robot. Of course controlling all of this effectively is extremely difficult and that’s often why robots like spot use vastly simplified kinematic models, because it makes the equations go from near impossible to solve to just hard.
series elastic actuators are promising and I have high hopes for their use in the future. I have some colleagues who work with them. The limitations there are more to do with complexity and finding ways to dynamically tune the force impedance of the springs.
I suspect the Festo muscles will end up in mostly industrial products which need simple, linear motion, and weight and efficiency don’t matter as much. Eg manufacturing equipment and active vibration damping systems.
Would love to be proved wrong on this however.
I bet the "muscles" themselves are quite quiet.
i've seen some wire twisting as motor few years back, maybe that's what they use
All these things would fit in a human chest - we have a plastic skeleton next to it. We are working on further minimizing this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_artificial_muscles
Hydraulic, rather than pneumatic, operation has also been attempted.
Fun stuff, but nowhere close to being practical in any way for real world robotics. And, no, it isn't a matter of iterating and optimization. These kinds of actuators will never be anywhere close to the energy efficiency and technical simplicity necessary to build something like a full function humanoid with hundreds of actuators that can run without a small power plant connected to it via an umbilical cord and everyone in the room wearing hearing protection.
That said, it is great to see people experimenting and learning. Nothing wrong with that. Great video.
You provide valuable information but I just hate how you succumb to easy thinking, an appeal to tradition [2]: "well it hadn't been done then so it can't possibly be done now." It's a form of anachronistic gatekeeping. It doesn't belong in the age we currently reside in.
We have totally different computational abilities today, powerful beyond reason. Our hardware is smaller and better performing. We can perform digital simulations billions of times before we even execute one physical experiment.
I've seen the same attitude with age-old mathematics problems and it makes even less sense in that domain. The ability to perform computational experiments that our predecessors couldn't, changes the viability of almost every unsolved problem.
Boston Dynamics would have never created Atlas or Spot if they clung to common tropes about robots. And now, due to battery technology, the once tethered robots are dexterously mobile. [2]
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/05/how-much-cheaper-a...
The upper stage still is discarded, but if they can pull off the Starshuttle it will be huge and the first operating at anywhere near that scale with full reuse.
For this kind of artificial muscle actuator, there are fundamental limits to the way the physics works for this design which prevent it from ever simultaneously having good efficiency in energy and power density, high strain and high frequency operation. There are certainly ways to make artificial muscles work, but hydraulics is not the way.
For rockets and space vehicles, the limit has more to do with technology and material science.
No. I appeal to PHYSICS.
This isn't an emotional argument. Or one out of "tradition".
The reusable rocket was a question of implementation, not physics. The math actually supported the idea of being able to do that. It wasn't some magical juju bean Musk pulled out of his behind. They did the math. The math proved you could do it. They built it. It took a lot of trial and error and, yes, failure, but they KNEW the math supported the concept.
This inflatable muscle thing (air or fluid) isn't supported by the PHYSICS.
What do I know anyhow? I've only been in robotics since the early 80's. I have literally seen <insert fantastical claim> in robotics and artificial intelligence since that time. And here we are, we still don't have a robot of any kind that is as capable as a house fly, even with a supercomputer running it remotely.
And that, BTW, is the test for fantastical actuators. The technology has to support an amazing range in terms of scale. At one extreme you have something like an ant and, opposite that, an elephant. Even within a human being the range of size and strength in muscles is likely 1000 to 1 (haven't done the math).
> Boston Dynamics would have never created Atlas or Spot
I don't think you have a good sense of what these machines are and are not. Hint: They are not what you think they are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_artificial_muscles
* without the power source and pumps
wow how can you even say this is a human arm? I don't even see any power source!
That said, as a first step this is very impressive and very lifelike, too.
The main issue with this is going to be proprioception more than anything - it doesn't seem like you'd be able to do what robots do: rely on position encoders. To make this do something for real it's going to need a way to know its own position, and feel pressure.
And yet I'm a fully functional adult human being and can get by perfectly fine in life.
So for me from a robotics point of view a much smaller starting range is perfect, once you've built it into a platform you can start optimizing and increasing potential.
We already have encoders in our fingers, however we have delays in electronics that will aggregate the data. The next hand model will have feedback.
However, the real problem is refining the manufacturing process to be repeatable. Too many things are done "by eye" at the moment.
Why is the robot arm a right arm and the one manipulating it a left arm?
Why is nothing above the elbow shown?
I am not saying this is fake, but it wouldn't be hard to fake. A few little zipping noises, some body paint, speed it up slightly, add in some CGI muscles underneath the skin...
Again, I'm not saying it is fake, but it could easily be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
are you asking about the person manipulating it? If so I guess that person is just right handed and needs to hold the camera somehow...