In Video, Humanoid Robot Crosses Narrow Balance Beam Like A Cakewalk
In Video, Humanoid Robot Crosses Narrow
Balance Beam Like A Cakewalk
In
the three-minute video, the robot carefully moves across a series of narrow
cinder blocks and a balance beam, revealing a degree of body control that many
humans would struggle to maintain.
IHMC Robotics said their robot is "about 50% successful
over this type of terrain"
At first glance, a
humanoid robot walking between two platforms across several cinder blocks may
look like a simple feat.
How many times, after
all, have you crossed a shallow creek by hopping from one stone to another or
threaded a narrow path while hiking without toppling over?
Seems fairly simple,
right?
But the ability to
navigate such obstacles by the human body, with its complex joints and natural
system for creating balance, is far more difficult to replicate in a machine,
especially one that operates autonomously.
To showcase that
difficulty, researchers from The Institute for Human & Machine Cognition in
Pensacola, Florida, released a video this month showing their efforts to train
a bulky, 165-pound humanoid robot to walk across narrow terrain using
autonomous planning. In the three-minute video, the robot - a Boston
Dynamics-built Atlas model that uses control, perception and planning
algorithms created by IHMC Robotics - carefully moves across a series of narrow
cinder blocks and a balance beam, revealing a degree of body control that many
humans would struggle to maintain.
In a statement
that accompanies the video, IHMC Robotics said their robot is "about 50%
successful over this type of terrain."
"We plan to
increase the rate of success by adding balance using angular momentum and by
better considering joint ranges of motion," the statement says.
"Narrow terrain
is difficult due to the need to do some 'cross-over' steps, which are tricky
due to limited range of motion in the hip joint, and also due to having a small
polygon of support when one foot is directly in front of the other," the
statement adds.
IHMC Robotic says
their robot senses the terrain below using LIDAR, a system that uses a pulsed laser
sensor to measure the distance between objects and is a crucial component of
many autonomous vehicles' navigation systems. The robot also uses a "path
planning algorithm" to trace its route between the beginning of its
journey and its goal.
Jerry Pratt, a senior
research scientists at IHMC Robotics, said researchers are focused on creating
humanoid robots that can walk in a bipedal manner over a variety of terrain.
Despite improvements, robots remain unable to reach the same places as people,
he said.
"The advantage
of being bipedal and humanoid is that your mobility has the potential to be
really good," Pratt said. "If you think about everywhere a human go
can go it's really incredible. We can climb mountains or go into caves or hike
through snow or climb stairs. There aren't many places we can't go."
One of the reasons
for that mobility is that the human foot is only about three to four inches
wide, Pratt said, whereas a robot on wheels, like a Roomba, for example, is
about 13 inches wide. Our relatively small, narrow feet allow us to move around
tight obstacles with ease, or step over barriers, all while supporting a higher
center of mass that boosts us far off the ground, where we can manipulate the
world above (grabbing a branch with a piece of fruit attached, for example).
The versatility
provided by the bipedal humanoid form is why researchers want to recreate it in
robotic form. At the moment, Pratt said, there aren't any humanoid or legged
robots being sold for applications outside of entertainment, advertising and
education, but that may change. Pratt said he believes a bipedal humanoid robot
would be immediately useful for bomb squads, firefighting units or rescue
missions, such as a team combing through a collapsed building or an avalanche.
A place that a wheeled robot would struggle to reach -- such as inside a
vehicle or a booby-trapped building -- presents an opportunity for a bipedal
bot, he said.Perhaps the most intriguing setting for using bipedal humanoid
robots is extraterrestrial. When humans colonize other planets, Pratt said, one
scenario involves sending remotely operated robots ahead to develop a habitat
suitable for human beings. Being able to send robots that look and move like
us, Pratt said, would give scientists a major advantage.
"If you had to design things on the
ground for a wheeled robot it would be much more expensive," he added.
"We could decrease the required launch mass and have a world that would be
designed for our bodies before we even got there."
(c) 2019 The
Washington Post
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