“It’s powerful enough to lift and toss a heavy cinder block”
“Boston Dynamics’ BigDog”

Boston Dynamics’ BigDog may have already been replaced by the beefier LS3, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally obsolete. Today the company unveiled a version of the quadruped equipped with an arm where a head (or tail) would go. As can be seen in the following video, it’s powerful enough to lift and toss a heavy cinder block.

Key to this work, funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, is that BigDog uses the dynamic forces of its whole body to help it throw the cinder block. It begins by taking several steps to the side before quickly accelerating as it swings its arm, temporarily launching itself into the air in the process. This approach is similar to the way an athlete winds up before throwing a discus, for example, and greatly enhances the robot’s throwing power. Since few robots are as capable as BigDog when it comes to balance, it’s an excellent platform to test these sorts of strenuous actions.

It’s somewhat puzzling that BigDog’s new configuration doesn’t include two arms, which is a form factor that has been explored by researchers in the past. Back in the early 1990s, the Japanese government unveiled a nuclear plant inspection robot with a humanoid upper-body that walked on four legs. The idea was to combine the stability of a four-legged robot with the manipulation capabilities of a human. More recently, a team at the Italian Institute of Technology has shown plans that would add a pair of arms to their quadruped HyQ, presumably for the same reasons.

Perhaps with an arm or two BigDog – which has cost tens of millions to develop so far – could still help soldiers do some heavy lifting while its descendant is transporting gear out in the field. If a new version of BigDog had two arms to work with, it could presumably lift even heavier objects.

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Well, it helps if you have a laser cutter and a PhD in robotics.

Created by Paul Birkmeyer and Prof. Ronald Fearing at the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley, DASH is extremely lightweight (16 grams) and uses a single DC motor to power the legs and a small servomotor to slightly deform the robot’s body, making it turn left or right. The little robot can reach speeds of 1.5 meters per second and is flexible/strong enough to be dropped from a height of 28 meters without breaking. It picks up and dashes off again. Just be careful about running the robot near people who are squeamish about insects — or DASH might get smashed.

Video: http://youtu.be/LsTKAtBBkfU

DASH Roachbot Learns Acrobatic Flips from Real Cockroach

DASH, UC Berkeley’s 10-centimeter long, 16-gram Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, has learned a new trick: the robot can now perform “rapid inversion” maneuvers, dashing up to a ledge and then swinging itself around to end up underneath the ledge and upside-down. This replicates behaviors in cockroaches and geckos, and may lead to a new generation of acrobatically-inclined insectobots.

Cockroaches have a notorious (and much hated) ability to vanish from sight before your brain even decides you should take a swat at it. And if you’ve ever tried to chase down a gecko , you know that they’re not just fast, but they’re also incredibly agile. These abilities stem in great part from the fact that cockroaches and geckos are small and light, and consequently don’t have to overcome much inertia when changing direction. We’ve only recently been able to take advantage of technologies that allow for the creation of robots at similar scales, and such robots (like DASH) exhibit impressive speed and agility.

Recently, researchers at UC Berkeley’s PolyPEDAL Lab, led by Professor Robert Full, demonstrated that cockroaches can perform “rapid inversions” on a ledge, a previously unknown behavior. Surprisingly, while on a vacation research trip at the Wildlife Reserves near Singapore, the researchers discovered a similar behavior in lizards and documented geckos using this technique in the jungle to escape predators and nosy scientists. Next, Full’s group teamed up with roboticists from Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab to see if DASH could be taught to do the same sort of thing. Sure it could:

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For some reason, roboticists seem to enjoy testing their creations by kicking them, punching them,shoving them, and even striking them with baseball bats and heavy pendulums. All in the name of science, of course. It wasn’t different with this Japanese pair of robot legs, which as you can see from the photo above, is about to get kicked in the gut.

If we want robots that can do chores around the house, care for the elderly, or (if you’re a DARPA program manager) drive trucks and crash through walls, then we need robots with actuators that are both fast and strong. The problem is actuators based on electrical motors can only deliver a limited amount of power, and the alternative, hydraulics, requires bulky pumps and can be difficult to control.

Junichi Urata and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab, led by Professor Masayuki Inaba, are working on a possible solution. They’ve developed a high-torque, high-speed robotic leg based on a novel electrical actuation system. Their robot uses high-voltage and high-current liquid-cooled motor drivers that get their power from a 13.5-farad capacitor system. Why a capacitor? Because it can supply lots of current very fast and reliably, something that batteries are not good at. The researchers modified an existing HRP3L, developed by Kawada Industries, to create their robot, which they call HRP3L-JSK

Thanks to the capacitor-powered motor drivers, the robot’s Maxon 200-watt brushless motors (modified to be liquid-cooled) can achieve instantaneous speeds of over 1000 degrees per second and 350 Nm of torque on the robot’s knee joint. This capability allows the 53-kg robot to react to disturbances (in its case, kicks, knee strikes, and other abuse from researchers) and even jump 44 centimeters off the ground (though the landing part will need work).

The robot relies on a new balance control system that detects disturbances and computes 170 foot placement possibilities in 1 millisecond, choosing the best candidate to keep the robot from falling. The new method is a collaboration between the JSK team and researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Urata, who recently received a PhD degree for his HRP3L-JSK work, now has his eyes on the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He’s starting to organize a team to add manipulation arms and more sensors to the HRP3L-JSK lower-body. Will their fully electrical robot be able to perform all the tasks DARPA has conceived for the challenge? DARPA, for its part, has chosen a Boston Dynamics humanoid powered by hydraulic systems as the official hardware platform (to be used by teams that don’t want, or can’t afford, to develop their own robot). As more teams join the competition, it will be interesting to see what kind of actuation system they choose. Electrical or hydraulics: which will prevail?

http://youtu.be/fwoFjzLZ5rQ

Prof. Dr. Masayuki Inaba

Masayuki Inaba is a Professor in the Information Science and Technology, Graduate School at the University of Tokyo. He graduated from the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tokyo in 1981, and received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the graduate school of Information Engineering at The University of Tokyo in 1983 and 1986 respectively. He was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Tokyo in 1986, an associate professor in 1989, and a professor in the Department of Mechano-Informatics in 2000, and also a professor in new Department of Creative Informatics from 2005. He is directing the Robotics Lab, JSK at The University of Tokyo.

His research interests include key technologies of robotic systems and software architectures to advance robotics research. His research projects have included hand-eye coordination in rope handling, vision-based robotic server system, remote-brained robot approach, whole-body behaviors in humanoids, robot sensor suit with electrically conductive fabric, flexible spined humanoid and developmental JSK mother projects with the remote-brained system environment, life-size assistive humanoids, musculoskeletal spined humanoid series, whole-body soft sensor tissues, IRT home assitance with personal mobility, open-source robotics middlewares, high speed-and-powered legs for the next generation, on the budget from MEXT and MITI, such as ongoing Grant-in-Aid Scientific Research(S) entitled “Developmental Approach in Configuring Body and Behavior of Life-size Humanoids with Whole-body Passivity and Attention Inductivity”.

He received several awards including outstanding

-Paper Awards in 1987, 1998 and 1999 from the Robotics Society of Japan, JIRA Awards in 1994,
-ROBOMECH Awards in 1994 and 1996 from the division of Robotics and Mechatronics of Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers,
-and Best Paper Awards of International Conference on Humanoids in 2000 and 2006 with JSK Robotics Lab members.

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