One-legged gimp bot

[Taro Toporific]

[floatl][/floatl]

Robots on Yahoo! News Photos, Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006
Toyota Motors Corp. ..... a prototype of one-legged robot is shown in Japan. Without using a motor, the 1-meter (3.3 feet)-tall robot can leap 4 centimeter (1.6 inch) high with its extra joint installed at its tiptoe...more...

[Charles]

I challenge this robot to an ass-kicking contest.

[maninjapan]

I challenge this robot to an ass-kicking contest.

What a crap idea?! What is the point of a one legged jumping robot?!

kick start the economy guys and give me more money!

[Charles]

What a crap idea?! What is the point of a one legged jumping robot?!

While you wouldn't want a one-legged robot in an ass-kicking contest, there are real applications. For example, the US DoD is experimenting in cluster bombs and artillery that deliver self-deploying land mine networks. These are little robot mines that can hop to a different location to disperse themselves, or pop up to explode above ground when it senses a threat.

[amdg]

or pop up to explode above ground when it senses a threat.

What kind of things would a land mine consider to be a threat?

Maybe Princess Diana?

[Charles]

What kind of things would a land mine consider to be a threat?

That is the $64 Billion question. Small animals, no threat. Soldiers, tanks = threat. These land mine systems have computerized sensor nets, so it can do all sorts of clever things.

Of course nobody thought of the obvious problem: in the fog of war, complex weapon systems usually fail to perform as designed.

[Taro Toporific]

What a crap idea?! What is the point of a one legged jumping robot?!!

The pogo robot idea floating around since the 80s. It's not a crazy as it first seems.

Marc H. Raibert/Leg Laboratory of Carnagie-Mellon made a unipod pogo robot which you may have see---the final visualization of the actual functioning model won 1992 Sigraph. Athough one-legged hooper do not exist in nature, these function like a one-legged kangaroos and were speedy, maneuverable robots rather than the typical slow-moving robots you see in Japan.

See YouTube for a non-Carnagie-Mellon One-Leg Hopper Robot

http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/twiki/bin/view/PolyPEDAL/MediaFrom

PolyPEDAL

Biologist Robert Full made the case for the pogo-stick theory in Durham, N.C., recently at a meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and suggested ways that the idea could be applied to robot design.... It doesn't matter how many legs an animal has, how they're constructed or how the body is connected to them. It makes no difference what an animal's skeleton is made of. Legs basically work like sticks with springs attached, Full said, flexing to absorb energy and then releasing it to propel the animal forward. ...Despite their apparent differences, they all run the same way. ``This turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful method,'' Full said.

`They were hitting the brakes and then stepping on the gas,'' Full said, like a pogo stick lurching foward with each bounce.

Even a centipede, with dozens of legs, lurches forward as it walks. Progress that appears smooth in real time looks like a rhythmic sequence of pushing forward, then pausing, then moving along again.

``Anything that works like that can be described as a spring or a pogo stick,'' said Tom McMahon of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

The first part of each step is the release of energy as the spring uncoils, throwing the pogo stick and its rider up and forward. Then when the pogo stick hits the ground, the spring compresses, storing energy for the next hop.

Full has demonstrated that legs do the same thing, storing energy from one step and then releasing it on the next. And McMahon's research has shown that in a wide variety of animals, legs have the same amount of stiffness no matter what they're doing.

``The leg working as a spring doesn't change its stiffness,'' McMahon said. ``It just works as an ordinary rubber band. And that was a big surprise.''