{"id":13709,"date":"2023-04-14T20:29:48","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T20:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/14\/cmu-taught-a-robot-dog-to-walk-a-balance-beam\/"},"modified":"2023-04-14T20:29:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T20:29:48","slug":"cmu-taught-a-robot-dog-to-walk-a-balance-beam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/14\/cmu-taught-a-robot-dog-to-walk-a-balance-beam\/","title":{"rendered":"CMU taught a robot dog to walk a balance beam"},"content":{"rendered":"


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While discussing humanoid robots not long ago, someone told me their main issue with the form factor is that \u2014 from an evolutionary standpoint \u2014 we\u2019re not built particularly well. That\u2019s not to say that our bodies haven\u2019t served us well, of course.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve done the trick for a few hundred thousand years. It\u2019s more that if you sat down with a talented product designer and asked them to whip up something from scratch, certain concerns would likely lead them in an entirely different direction.<\/p>\n

Balance is on that list. Again, we\u2019ve done just fine for ourselves, all things considered, but if balancing was high on your list of priorities, you might opt for something with four legs and a lower center of gravity.<\/p>\n

This off-the-shelf dog robot is a perfectly fine place to start. The quadruped is plenty stable in its standard locomotion. As you\u2019d likely expect, that changes quickly when you, say, stick it on top of a balance beam<\/a>. That, however, is the sort of challenge you live for, if you\u2019re a part of a lab like Carnegie Mellon University\u2019s Robotics Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis experiment was huge,\u201d says assistant professor Zachary Manchester. \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone has ever successfully done balance beam walking with a robot before.\u201d<\/p>\n

As to why this is such a big challenge\u2026 for starters, these robots aren\u2019t designed to do it. Again, if you\u2019re that omnipotent designer, you\u2019d add in more flexibility and counter balance, for starters. The solution the team landed on is that big backpack you see in the above photo. That\u2019s a reaction wheel actuator (RWA) \u2014 something used to help control the altitude of satellites.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou basically have a big flywheel with a motor attached,\u201d adds Manchester. \u201cIf you spin the heavy flywheel one way, it makes the satellite spin the other way. Now take that and put it on the body of a quadruped robot.\u201d<\/p>\n

CMU notes:<\/p>\n

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Manchester said it was easy to modify an existing control framework to account for the RWAs because the hardware doesn\u2019t change the robot\u2019s mass distribution, nor does it have the joint limitations of a tail or spine. Without needing to account for such constraints, the hardware can be modeled like a gyrostat (an idealized model of a spacecraft) and integrated into a standard model-predictive control algorithm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Why, you may ask, would anyone spend time developing such a thing? Aside from the obvious satisfaction of watching a dog robot walk a balance beam, the most immediate answer is search and rescue. That\u2019s long been a key application for these sorts of robots \u2014 sending machines where you wouldn\u2019t normally send humans. It\u2019s easy enough to see why balance is super important in just such a scenario.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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While discussing humanoid robots not long ago, someone told me their main issue with the form factor is that \u2014 from an evolutionary standpoint \u2014 we\u2019re not built particularly well. That\u2019s not to say that our bodies haven\u2019t served us well, of course. They\u2019ve done the trick for a few hundred thousand years. It\u2019s more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13709","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}