Legged Robots - Computerphile

How do you make a legged robot robust when the environment is against it? Ioannis Havoutis of Oxford Robotics Institute walks us through it.


This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

coyotes are well known to communicate mainly with written signs on a pole.

[Attni]

I just wanna appreciate how much effort goes into making and editing these videos and pushing out regular uploads. This was apparently shot on July 13 (8:50). Really appreciate the content and really great video as always!

[hpekristiansen]

9:11 Did you see that thing!? -so human like

[octopuscabbage]

the funny thing about reinforcement learning people is they say the advantage of rl over mpc is "you don't need a model of your dynamics" but then immediately say "we train it in a simulator [with a model of the dynamics]"

[prakharmishra]

Loving computerphile's foray into robotics!

[speedfastman]

We're getting closer and closer to robot humanoid cat girls. Hang on tight boys it's just around the corner.

[OlsonBW]

One thing I've always noticed is that the robots always seem to have the same power to the actuators all the way through the motion.

You can take your arms and swing the lower part around without using any muscles in your forearm by hanging it down and using your upper arm to swing it back and forth. I have never seen a robot where you can do that.

Why is this important? It is important because it wastes a lot of effort and energy. It also causes robots to be stiff and jerky compared to humans or animals where you can describe a lot of people and animals and graceful. When is the last time (the answer is never for me) where you saw a robot be graceful?

I think that is one of the biggest reasons why robots will not "seem" like humans anytime soon unless they stop powering every second of an action. 

You do not strain your muscles unless you are lifting or moving a heavy load. Robots always seem like like they are using maximum effort for everything they do. If we did that with our bodies we would be exhausted and need to lay down most of the day or we would develop much bigger or stronger muscles with more endurance.

Instead our brains have learned that you don't need maximum effort all of the time. In fact, --most-- of the time you do NOT need maximum effort. Instead you most often need less than half and in many cases less than 25%.

I'd love to hear thoughts on this about potential smoothness of robots so that they would be a LOT more graceful AND for energy savings that could be had in this area.

[Pinefenario]

Nice video! I think with robotics we are at same point as with computers back in the eighthees.

[JuanPabloCarbajal]

Nice to see Ubuntu desktop in that screen cast

[daveduncan]

Has anyone tried to gather all the information from CGI data mapping human motion to use for creating algorithms for models of robotic motion?

[accountname]

This guy is working on legged robots and zuckerberg can't even get legged pixels to work on a computer

[JakeAikens]

Remember this video when one of these is chasing your family down the street.

[AcornElectron]

Neural networks running potentially self replicating robots… what could possibly go wrong?

[SharhbiniRauf]

You must put parendev motor + alternator, so your robot alive 50 years non stop.

[gasdive]

4 leg robots seems to be a mistake. 4 legs are an accident of history, and never came from walking anyway.

It seems that if you've got a many legs as you want, 8 is near optimum. Everything evolves into a crab.

Watch an Australian huntsman spider hunting. It's awesome.

[TaranovskiAlex]

Sorry, so once again - what do you do specifically? You replicate what boston dynamics did, but from scratch? And why couldn't you use the spot or other models? Why can't you use that chinese model (forgot the name, unfortunately - you can look it up in the news) unveiled not so long ago?

[BD..]

Looks like you use Roblox to make models lol

[AleksyGrabovski]

It's already 2022 and robots are still so lame...

[scowell]

For ongoing learning you'll have to have it 'bruise' its brain! Every time it falls some random number gets installed... that's how neural networks learn... there has to be pain (or death!).

[recklessroges]

ANYmal ? MAL ? Really ? Why not just skip to calling it Death Dog 9000 /s