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Comment by leyfa | Hacker News Reader

What's the state of the art in humanoid or multi-pedal robots in terms of robustness and flexibility of their movement and balance? I assume ASIMO isn't as stable and stress resistant as the robots of Boston Dynamics, for example http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_petman.html

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Asimo seems quite a bit more advanced overall than those robots. They are designed for quite specific purposes and domain - it's hard to tell but they also don't seem autonomous. With Asimo, Handa is going for a general purpose robot that can emulate a human while Boston Dynamic appears to be going for more specific military needs with things like BigDog.

From what I learned from a BD engineer, Japanese legged robotics use mostly static equilibrium in contrast with the (more advanced?) dynamic balancing of US and European robots. Asimo might look cute, but if you compare the gait of any of the popular MIT, Boston Dynamics or CMU robots to the Japanese, you soon notice that the latter don't look very natural or adequate to unpredictable terrain.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robotics#Loco...

That's true enough, but only the military and EMS need robots that can instantly handle unfamiliar terrain. Meanwhile, the Japanese are most of the way towards a consumer product, since the interior of a building is highly predictable.

Good point, but if you don't need to handle unstructured terrain, you might just as well put the robot on wheels. The humanoids robot Justin from DLR [1] for instance has an omnidirectional wheeled platform that even allows for adaptive foot print. The only current advantage for ASIMO that I see at the moment, is that it doesn't have to take the elevator but can use stairs.

[1] Here is a good video from 2009 that shows that Justin is capable of the same tasks that Honda showed of today http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPwpGpMoAxs

Quite - and with 4 wheels, I imagine that stairs would be manageable for Justin as well. You might like this too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qJyAWZeV4

I think US industrial/product designers are seriously underestimating the market for consumer-facing humanoid robots.

> with 4 wheels, I imagine that stairs would be manageable for Justin as well

In theory yes, but not with the current design.

> You might like this too: Yes, ABB's Frida looks impressive, but so far there seems to be very little information about the technical data.

> I think US industrial/product designers are seriously underestimating the market for consumer-facing humanoid robots.

There is rumor, that Rodney Brooks's Heartland Robotics http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/ will release something similar to Frida soon.

Running, jumping on one foot while turning 90 degrees. I think that is just remarkable stable. Take a look at this slowmo-footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifl55QShWfE It looks like the legs are constantly adapting. But ofcourse this could be programmed.

Look how low to the ground the foot is, though.

Although the Boston Dynamics robots seem more fluid and may have more flexible and natural overall movement, the ASIMO seems more autonomous. I haven't seen any of the Boston Dynamics robots actually performing a task adaptively (other than adapting to terrain and pushes/kicks). PETMAN looks really interesting but until it is turned loose untethered, ASIMO wins the best android contest.

Boston Dynamics robots like Big Dog use hydraulic actuators [1] which act somewhat like a spring and are hence very robust towards perturbations. They also have more power (= force*velocity). ASIMO in contrast uses an electric motor with a high ratio gear drive [2] that makes the robot very stiff and slow while allowing for high torques. This setup doesn't allow for backdrive and hence can't handle impacts well. I don't know about the new ASIMO legs but in the video you can still hear the screaming of the gears.

[1] At least the orignal Raibert Hoppers at MIT also used pneumatic actuators http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/robots/3D_hopper/3D_ho... [2] e.g. Harmonic Drives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_drive

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