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Manned 4 Meter Tall Mech - "METHOD-1"

Abendrot

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Researchers at "Korea Future Technologies" under the direction of its chief designer Vitaly Bulgarov have succeeded in building a 4 meter tall walking mech with arms that mimic the movement of the pilot's arms within.


I'll be damned. I never believed anyone could get a robot taller than a human to walk. This is very cool and all, but I doubt that it will find real world application. The stability of the walking mechanism has a long way to go before it can provide advantages over tracked vehicles, and even by that point, it will be far more expensive.

Interview with the designer: Interview: Vitaly Bulgarov, designer of that giant Korean robot suit
 
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The cool thing about this robot is that the structure robot body is similar to the human body that makes some aspect of the control mechanism more intuitive. E.g.: you don't have to learn a lot to control the robot arms in contrast to traditional cranes.

However a lot of properties of the human body and the robot are still different (e.g.: acceleration of arms, joints, the weigh balance of the body) that make it challenging to simulate senses (like force feedback, keeping balance of the whole body, friction/drag force between robot fingers and grabbed objects). You can clearly see the awkward movements while the robot makes its baby steps.

If we consider the robot body as a whole then in case of some applications (e.g.: military uses on a battlefield) it would be better to keep some aspects of control automated. E.g.: Instead of having complete control over the legs and the body it would be easier to simply tell the robot where to go and in which direction to point with the "head"/cockpit and have "full" control only over the arms and some other devices. In that case the movement of the robot could be solved much more efficiently (e.g.: having spider legs).

It has to be a balance beween automated controls and human control. The robot arm is a very good candidate for full human control as it is relatively easy to implement well.

Remote control isn't a big deal and isn't difficult to implement but it comes with some tradeoffs. Inside the robot the physical feedback is obviously better (e.g.: you can feel centrifugal forces) and some of these things are difficult and expensive to implement accurately in a remote control system. Some (military) simulation systems do a good job at this.

Many things that seem to be a good idea and look good don't work in practice. (e.g.: whole body balance, legs of the robot). Unfortunately a lot of aspects of control can't be mapped to the human body in an intuitive way even if they look good in sci-fi movies.
 
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