Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. They've even welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says moving right along.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Obama, and Joe McCormick. You guys,
Speaker 1: I have like a super awesome, cool description of a
Speaker 1: DARPA challenge. I want to tell you a DARPA challenge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know DARPA. That's that that that big old
Speaker 1: facility or agency I should say, in the United States
Speaker 1: that ends up funding lots of stuff for essentially the
Speaker 1: Department of Defense. Without DARPA, we wouldn't necessarily have things
Speaker 1: like autonomous cars that are coming out. Google's autonomous car
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a thing because a lot of people who
Speaker 1: worked on that originally developed autonomous cars as part of
Speaker 1: a DARPA challenge. So DARPA issues these challenges out to
Speaker 1: pretty much any entity that can compete in them and says,
Speaker 1: if you're able to do you know, this particular task
Speaker 1: in this particular way with something, then when you will
Speaker 1: be awarded a certain kind of prize. So in this case,
Speaker 1: the Darker challenge, I wanted to talk about has to
Speaker 1: do with the robotics. They don't all necessarily deal with robotics,
Speaker 1: but this one specifically does. So here's the challenge. You
Speaker 1: first have to build a robot that is capable of
Speaker 1: moving around and sensing an environment, be able to leave
Speaker 1: a building, climbed down a set of stairs, go to
Speaker 1: a golf cart, get in the golf cart, and drive
Speaker 1: the golf cart to a different location in dynamic situation.
Speaker 1: So there could be traffic, there could be pedestrians, and
Speaker 1: the robot has to be able to navigate around these
Speaker 1: things without causing harm to itself or others, you know,
Speaker 1: three laws. And then it gets to a new location,
Speaker 1: gets out of the golf cart, goes into another building,
Speaker 1: climbs a different set of stairs, then has to break
Speaker 1: through a wall, and then find a fire hose, pick
Speaker 1: it up and point it at a target. Now, does
Speaker 1: it have to turn the fire hose on? Not necessarily,
Speaker 1: at least that's not how it was described to me.
Speaker 1: So the whole point of the exercise is to really
Speaker 1: push the limits of what we can do in robotics.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the case with all the DARPA challenges.
Speaker 1: It's it's meant to be something that really makes engineers
Speaker 1: and scientists work extra hard in order to achieve it,
Speaker 1: because these are extraordinarily difficult things to ask of anyone,
Speaker 1: but also very useful and and extraordinarily difficult. Absolutely, like
Speaker 1: I couldn't do that, Like, I mean, the kool aid
Speaker 1: man would be able to break through the wall apart,
Speaker 1: but not I think that the rest could be a challenge.
Speaker 1: This is exactly yeah. Yeah, I did not say that
Speaker 1: the robot had to yell out oh yeah after coming
Speaker 1: through the wall. So I think I think it's the
Speaker 1: only obvious. I think you kind of have to have
Speaker 1: it do that. But so anyway, the winning group I
Speaker 1: think gets like two million dollars if they win this, uh, which,
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things, when you think about
Speaker 1: how much work goes into making something like this happen,
Speaker 1: is probably getting pay it about about the you know,
Speaker 1: it's probably maybe even taking a loss, who knows. But
Speaker 1: the idea is that you'd have to have a robot
Speaker 1: that's strong enough to break through a wall. It would
Speaker 1: have to be able to maintain its balance by going
Speaker 1: up and downstairs. It would have to be able to
Speaker 1: be environmentally aware, so it had to be able to
Speaker 1: to uh navigate around obstacles, have to be able to
Speaker 1: actually navigate period, and have to have some form of
Speaker 1: of maps inside of it, our GPS that could know
Speaker 1: how to get from location A to location b. Um.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of different elements to this challenge,
Speaker 1: and none of them are easy. I have a question,
Speaker 1: does it have to be a two legged robot? Or
Speaker 1: can it be a six legged robot that goes downstairs
Speaker 1: and drives a golf cart? It does not have to
Speaker 1: be a two legged robot. A lot of the teams
Speaker 1: are focusing on making a human like robot because a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff we happen to operate, say like
Speaker 1: golf carts, happens to be made for human shaped things
Speaker 1: and not six legged uh insect bots. But there's nothing
Speaker 1: specific from what I understand because I actually asked that
Speaker 1: same question. I said, I said, is it does it
Speaker 1: have to be like a bipedal robot? And I was
Speaker 1: told no, it doesn't have to be. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you can figure out a way of engineering around that,
Speaker 1: then you could do that. And in fact, that's kind
Speaker 1: of what leads me up to this topic I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about. Is just the idea of how robots
Speaker 1: get around places. I mean, that's that's just one aspect
Speaker 1: of all the difficult things we we just mentioned, but
Speaker 1: it's still all in its own, hugely challenging. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea is robot locomotion. Locomotion is different from just motion.
Speaker 1: So robot motion is something we've been working on for
Speaker 1: a long time, making an arm that welds a car
Speaker 1: door or you know, or a cartesian robot that moves
Speaker 1: over something moving along under it on a conveyor belt
Speaker 1: and it can punch holes in it or something like that.
Speaker 1: But locomotion is talking about getting from one place to another,
Speaker 1: which is not necessarily as easy as it sounds, right,
Speaker 1: And in fact, if you look at a lot of
Speaker 1: the early robots used in manufacturing, those robots that were
Speaker 1: not meant to move, they weighed tons and tons and
Speaker 1: that you set them down. In fact, only were they
Speaker 1: not meant to move, they were not meant to be
Speaker 1: near people, like human interaction was not a thing because
Speaker 1: these were giant, powerful machines that could do serious injury
Speaker 1: to someone if they got in the way. But now
Speaker 1: we're talking about a world where our robots are coming
Speaker 1: into closer contact with us, and also that we want
Speaker 1: to send off to other places, how do we make
Speaker 1: sure they can get around? Right? And so robot locomotion
Speaker 1: is a big topic, and I think we could do
Speaker 1: a bunch of episodes about locomotion generally, I think today
Speaker 1: it would be cool to focus on one really specific
Speaker 1: challenge and maybe one of the hardest jobs in robot locomotion,
Speaker 1: which is getting around on other planets. Right, So we're
Speaker 1: talking about rovers here, the idea of some sort of
Speaker 1: robotic entity that can move around on the surface of
Speaker 1: a planet and it's receiving commands all the way back
Speaker 1: here from Earth. In some cases, I mean we'll actually
Speaker 1: really in pretty much all cases, you have to have
Speaker 1: a lot of autonomy built into the robot because from
Speaker 1: the time it comes into contact with something to the
Speaker 1: time when someone can react to it and send a
Speaker 1: message back to the time when it can then react
Speaker 1: to the message can be half an hour. Like within
Speaker 1: the case of of Mars, I think it's something like
Speaker 1: fourteen minutes each way. Well that that is one potential
Speaker 1: time because earthen mars are never Earthen mars are not
Speaker 1: always at the exact same distance from each other. Fourteen minutes.
Speaker 1: That's either the maximum or the minimum or the average.
Speaker 1: That number occurred for a reason, covering all the basis,
Speaker 1: you know, that was those specifically when the Curious Curiosity
Speaker 1: rover was landing on Mars. At that point, Earthen Mars
Speaker 1: were no longer at their closest points. Um they you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those things because the planets are
Speaker 1: always in motion, you have to you have to plan
Speaker 1: out these launches very specifically in order to conserve as
Speaker 1: much fuel as possible because as we know, fuel adds weight.
Speaker 1: But all of that aside, you know, even getting all
Speaker 1: of those challenges, which we could do a full episode
Speaker 1: just on the of getting the Curiosity or over to Mars,
Speaker 1: there's still the challenges of how does the rover move
Speaker 1: around once it lands on the planet. Right, So I
Speaker 1: think today we should just talk about a few different
Speaker 1: potential designs for how rovers get around, and before that,
Speaker 1: maybe we should talk about some general concerns. Um by
Speaker 1: no means is this list exhaustive, because there are tons
Speaker 1: of concerns that go into designing a robot. But think
Speaker 1: there are some good basic groups. Yeah, yeah, right, So
Speaker 1: number one I think is something that you might not
Speaker 1: think is important when it comes to somebody like NASA
Speaker 1: that has a government funding. Um. But actually it's very
Speaker 1: important even to space exploration, which is just cost and
Speaker 1: ease of design, specifically to space exploration, which we've seen
Speaker 1: received budget cuts several times of the last few d decades. Really, right,
Speaker 1: so pretty much all engineers have to consider this. You know,
Speaker 1: what are the cost of the things you're using, the
Speaker 1: cost of testing them, the cost of designing them, and
Speaker 1: how feasible is it to make this thing work in
Speaker 1: time for launch. Uh. There's also issues of mobility like
Speaker 1: how fast can it go, how definitely can it move
Speaker 1: around like it's turning radius and things like that. There's stability, um,
Speaker 1: which you could address two ways. One you could make
Speaker 1: a robot that is very resilient to falling over or
Speaker 1: resilient hasn't it doesn't fall over, Or you can make
Speaker 1: one that doesn't mind falling over. Yeah. This makes me
Speaker 1: think of those remote controlled cars that they that came
Speaker 1: out when I was a kid. The these these were
Speaker 1: designed in such a way that the car flipped over,
Speaker 1: you could continue controlling it. Uh, it would just mean
Speaker 1: that some of your controls would be reversed because the
Speaker 1: car itself was designed so the wheels were a greater
Speaker 1: diameter than the right And I've and I've seen some
Speaker 1: like military industrial robots that operated on a very on
Speaker 1: a similarly small scale, um in a similar way. And
Speaker 1: note here that that making instrumentation attached to your robot
Speaker 1: that doesn't mind getting tumbled all around might be one
Speaker 1: of the trickier parts of this particular Uh yeah, sure
Speaker 1: you might be able to get a robot to land
Speaker 1: on the planet and roll around a lot, but if
Speaker 1: you are designing a robot that can do that on
Speaker 1: its back, it probably doesn't have a lot of delicate
Speaker 1: equipment on it. Yeah. Uh yeah, So there's there's that.
Speaker 1: There's also the integrity of the robot as a as
Speaker 1: a structural unit. You don't want it to get stuck
Speaker 1: or to get broken easily. Uh. There's energy efficiency, which
Speaker 1: is a big deal. When you're shooting something far away
Speaker 1: from the Earth, you can't plug it in to recharge it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We haven't got a Tesla supercharged station on the Martian
Speaker 1: soil yet, and I don't think they have any plans
Speaker 1: in the near future to address that. No, So you
Speaker 1: either need like, really, come on, you're you're with SpaceX
Speaker 1: for gonness sakes. You need like a protected mobile power
Speaker 1: source that's gonna last a long time, like like curiosities,
Speaker 1: uh little nuclear diddy um, or you need something like
Speaker 1: solar panels to continuously absorb power from the sun. But
Speaker 1: but even with something like solar panels on mars Um,
Speaker 1: you've got some problems because solar panels number one or
Speaker 1: not that efficient. You're not going to be generating a
Speaker 1: whole lot of useful power. That's limited. Number two. They
Speaker 1: can get stuck out of alignment with the Sun, or
Speaker 1: they can become covered in dust. They're big and delicate
Speaker 1: and clumsy. You could even have your robot in a
Speaker 1: region of the planet where as it goes through its
Speaker 1: orbit it is no longer, you know, getting that much
Speaker 1: sunlight at all, which is what happened to a previous
Speaker 1: Martian rover that that is sadly no longer with us.
Speaker 1: Uh though Hey, a bonus of rover design is that
Speaker 1: these things should ideally move pretty slow in general, like
Speaker 1: like the Curiosity, for example, can go about four centimeters
Speaker 1: per second that's like point one three ft per second
Speaker 1: um and that low speed helps you um maximize the
Speaker 1: engine's output for for strength. It's likely you can get
Speaker 1: a lot more torque there than uh, and that's what
Speaker 1: you're concerned with, because you may be climbing an incline
Speaker 1: or going over a rock, and that's that's when you
Speaker 1: need a lot of torque. But you don't necessarily need
Speaker 1: to go fast. It's not like, as far as we know,
Speaker 1: no Martians have been chasing any of these. It's not
Speaker 1: like this rover needs to go point one four ft
Speaker 1: per second or it'll explode. Right Well, I mean the
Speaker 1: thing about is luckily not on Mars. Luckily that cuts
Speaker 1: down on a lot of scientific problems. From what I understand,
Speaker 1: I'm campaigning hard to get Kiano Reeves sent to Mars.
Speaker 1: Oh I've actually started a Kickstarter Yeah yeah, I reached
Speaker 1: funding soon. But then there's also just the concern of
Speaker 1: how do you get the rover to its destination, which
Speaker 1: is a much bigger problem than most people would probably realize. Like,
Speaker 1: you can't just put in our c car in a
Speaker 1: cannon and shoot it at Mars. You can, but it's
Speaker 1: not gonna it's not gonna make it there. It has
Speaker 1: to be something that you can put into a space
Speaker 1: veha goal and something that you can deposit on the
Speaker 1: foreign surface, whether it's you know, Mars or the Moon
Speaker 1: or wherever you want to take it without damaging the
Speaker 1: thing so that it can move around. This is not
Speaker 1: easy at all. Again, the Curiosity Rover really proved that
Speaker 1: it was. It was one of those plans. When I
Speaker 1: first heard it, I thought, well, that's crazy. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: had some crazy rocket parachute thing. Well, because the Martian
Speaker 1: atmosphere is not is not uh viscous enough really to
Speaker 1: have a parachute be very effective. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: able to slow the descent a little bit, but not
Speaker 1: like it would here on Earth, and it had to
Speaker 1: have rockets retro rockets essentially to slow its descent or
Speaker 1: else it never would have been able to make it
Speaker 1: down onto the surface safely. But also I mean pretty
Speaker 1: wicked shocks in order to to to let the wheels
Speaker 1: support its weight from a from a even the gentle drop.
Speaker 1: And so we're we're talking about like again, it was
Speaker 1: one of those where this whole thing had to happen
Speaker 1: autonomously because the rover was going to enter the atmosphere
Speaker 1: land on the plant's surface in less time. Than it
Speaker 1: would take for it to send a message back to Earth.
Speaker 1: So we were when we were waiting to hear about
Speaker 1: whether or not the Curiosity Rover had set down safely,
Speaker 1: it had actually done that fourteen minutes previously. So we
Speaker 1: found out and we all celebrated, but the actual event
Speaker 1: had happened fourteen minutes earlier. It's pretty incredible stuff when
Speaker 1: you think about it. And not only that, but you
Speaker 1: really have to make sure that your design is compact
Speaker 1: so it can fit within the confines of a spacecraft.
Speaker 1: It's not like we have a a you know, the
Speaker 1: ability to put any shape of spacecraft up in space.
Speaker 1: It's all dependent upon the rockets that you use, so
Speaker 1: you need to make sure that you're really conserving that space.
Speaker 1: Just like you don't want to have a whole lot
Speaker 1: of extra weight or and you don't want any extra
Speaker 1: weight if you can avoid it. You don't want to
Speaker 1: take up too much space either. Yeah, so I guess
Speaker 1: we should start with something like the Curiosity Rover and
Speaker 1: the other rovers that we've sent to Mars with the
Speaker 1: obvious one wheels. I mean, this is the obvious way
Speaker 1: to get a machine to move around, and there are
Speaker 1: pretty good reasons that it's the go to system for
Speaker 1: rover locomotion right now. Yeah, they're they're simple for one,
Speaker 1: one of the simplest machines that's out there. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's you know, you to look at the the inclined plane,
Speaker 1: the the lever well, the wheel and axles right up there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's the simpler you get, the better. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's one of the greatest strengths, right is because it's
Speaker 1: such a simple design, there are fewer parts to break down, right,
Speaker 1: So that's a big, big advantage. Yeah, it's just it's
Speaker 1: less complicated robotically. I mean, when you think about something
Speaker 1: like a robotic leg, think about all of the different
Speaker 1: movements and software calculations that have to take place just
Speaker 1: to move a leg from one place to another, let
Speaker 1: alone taking into account all the different types of terrain.
Speaker 1: Wheels work on a lot of different kinds pretty well.
Speaker 1: Especially since we're talking up out rolling at a very
Speaker 1: controlled rate. It's not like we're talking about trying to
Speaker 1: you know, do uh wheelies across the surface of Mars
Speaker 1: all that would be awesome. Um, it's so we're not
Speaker 1: worried so much about speed. We're worried more about the efficiency.
Speaker 1: We're worried about that power and for a lot of
Speaker 1: them the terrain we're looking at, wheels work just fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're just trying to drive across a pretty flat plane,
Speaker 1: wheels are going to be great. Yeah, Curiosity actually has
Speaker 1: some really cool wheels. Yes, it does rather. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: got some indentations in its wheels which allow it when
Speaker 1: it when it rolls over uh, soil, the regular it
Speaker 1: actually leaves behind little, um little patterns, and by maneuvering
Speaker 1: the robot in very specific ways, engineers on Earth can
Speaker 1: command the Curiosity Rover to roll around in such a
Speaker 1: way that these little uh, these little markings, these little
Speaker 1: raised portions from the indentations in the wheels end up
Speaker 1: spelling out Morse code messages. And so they've sent messages.
Speaker 1: You know, they've left messages for things like you know,
Speaker 1: putting in the initials JPL, things like that. Um, so
Speaker 1: it's cute stuff like that. Although they've also used it
Speaker 1: in order for the Curiosity Rover to to leave a
Speaker 1: mark behind that's just says this is your starting point. Okay,
Speaker 1: so like navigational stuff. Yeah, it's not just for you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just not just the equivalent of IBM manipulating
Speaker 1: individual atoms to spell out it's it's its name. Yeah. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: I think wheels are generally about as energy efficient as
Speaker 1: you can get. Now, if you are an engineer or
Speaker 1: robotics expert who would love to correct me on that, please,
Speaker 1: I invite that. But it seems that a wheel is
Speaker 1: is peak energy efficiency to me, it's pretty compact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: A wheel turning is a much lower Uh. It's it's
Speaker 1: much less energy to turn a wheel than say, manipulate
Speaker 1: a robotic limb that might have multiple servos and joints
Speaker 1: in it. Right. Well, I'm just thinking about like the
Speaker 1: different mechanical energy required to, say, uh, ride a bike
Speaker 1: across a flat plane a certain distance. You're getting into
Speaker 1: some gyroscopic elements that don't apply when you're when you're
Speaker 1: turning the wheel at a speed of point one three
Speaker 1: ft per second. But I understand what you're saying, uh,
Speaker 1: like if you you know, because uh, one of the
Speaker 1: things about a bicycle is that when you're moving at
Speaker 1: a certain speed, you have this gyroscopic effect that actually
Speaker 1: keeps you upright and helps you maintain balance. And uh,
Speaker 1: that would also quote unquote make things easier. So it's
Speaker 1: a little different, but uh, in general, yes, I agree, Um,
Speaker 1: there are some disadvantages. Oh yeah, Well, for one thing,
Speaker 1: wheels can get stuck especially Yeah. So in the spring
Speaker 1: of two thousand nine, the Spirit Rover, which by the way,
Speaker 1: I do not want to paint the Spirit Rover as
Speaker 1: a failure. The Spirit Rover long outlived its planned mission
Speaker 1: and it went all over the place. It It did
Speaker 1: a great job and it inspired lots of people. I mean,
Speaker 1: the NASA did a great job with getting the word
Speaker 1: out to the public about the Spirit, about the Curiosity
Speaker 1: as well, where it excited a lot of people about
Speaker 1: the space program, which is one reason it was kind
Speaker 1: of sad when, like I started to say, in the
Speaker 1: spring of two thousand nine, the Spirit became stuck. It
Speaker 1: was going across an an area called Troy on mars
Speaker 1: Um and its wheels became stuck in loose soil. And
Speaker 1: so for a long time after that, basically NASA was
Speaker 1: just trying to figure out a way to plan and
Speaker 1: escape action for the vehicle, but it never got out
Speaker 1: of the loose soil. Should have launched an enormous wooden
Speaker 1: horse to land right in front of it they could
Speaker 1: climb into and that would have been fine. I read
Speaker 1: my history, your your history, the idea. Okay, so that's
Speaker 1: not the only kind of surface that that wheels have
Speaker 1: trouble sometimes with what else have we got right? You
Speaker 1: could say, what if you needed to get over a
Speaker 1: pile of loose rocks, Well, in that case, wheels could
Speaker 1: have a lot of trouble. Yeah. Or if it's a
Speaker 1: if it's really really rocky terrain, wheels may not be
Speaker 1: able to uh may not be large enough to get
Speaker 1: over them. There's also what if there's a crack in
Speaker 1: the ground larger than the diameter of the wheel. I
Speaker 1: mean that's then you just get stuck. Yeah, if the
Speaker 1: wheel gets to the point where it's no longer making
Speaker 1: contact with the ground, you could be really seriously stuck.
Speaker 1: Or you're just talking about inclines. If the incline is
Speaker 1: steep enough, the wheel may have to work harder than
Speaker 1: the machine is capable of generating. I have to generate
Speaker 1: more power than it's capable of doing, and then you
Speaker 1: can't go any further. Or if you happen to be
Speaker 1: descending an incline, you might end up losing control, right,
Speaker 1: but despite these disadvantages, I don't want to give the
Speaker 1: impression that I think wheels are a thing of the past.
Speaker 1: I think wheels are awesome and it's amazing what you
Speaker 1: can do with wheels and smart engineering, like the like
Speaker 1: the rock or Bogeye system that they use for the
Speaker 1: suspension of the drive on the Curiosity rover. Right, these
Speaker 1: are the Curiosity. So it's got six wheels and each
Speaker 1: can be independently controlled, and each receives torque directly from
Speaker 1: the engine UM. The axles for each wheel are also
Speaker 1: independent UM. Each is connected to this UM suspension device.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like a leg like device. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of maneuverability there. You've got a
Speaker 1: lot of ability to uh to to give yourself the
Speaker 1: propulsion you need to get around or over obstacles. It's
Speaker 1: pretty ingenious. Yeah. If they're actually videos online you can
Speaker 1: go look up that are pretty cool. The jp L
Speaker 1: researchers trying to design the system and they're testing it
Speaker 1: in the lab, driving it over these little humps and
Speaker 1: it's it's the most inspiring crawling over a hump you've
Speaker 1: ever seen at the speed of a few centimeters per second. Yea,
Speaker 1: so those are wheels. Let's talk about legs. Legs. How
Speaker 1: come we don't have rovers with legs? Okay, So legs
Speaker 1: are great. I love them, love me, love me. My
Speaker 1: gams are great, fantastic. Well, they're really great for biological
Speaker 1: organisms like us, absolutely. I mean they let us get around, uh,
Speaker 1: let us get into trees and stuff out of trees. Both. Yea,
Speaker 1: there's the less climb things like we can climb stairs,
Speaker 1: we can get over rocks, we can do lots of
Speaker 1: cool things that are really useful. We can jump, we
Speaker 1: can hop, it's so nice outside. Sorry I got a
Speaker 1: little distracted, but yeah, we were able to use our
Speaker 1: legs to do a lot of things. Are very versatile
Speaker 1: is what I'm getting down. Too great for all kinds
Speaker 1: of terrain. Right, So in that sense, they're fantastic and uh,
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot of work being done building
Speaker 1: robotic legs that have a lot of versatility to them. However,
Speaker 1: that work takes a lot of time, because holy cow,
Speaker 1: is it hard to do. Yeah. I was just thinking
Speaker 1: that I can build um a wheel and axle with
Speaker 1: tinker toys, but I can't build legs. Yeah. The whole
Speaker 1: part where they're incredibly useful. Is because they have all
Speaker 1: of these different points of articulation. Yeah, and those points
Speaker 1: of articulation give us that freedom exactly so that we're
Speaker 1: able to, uh, to tackle various obstacles in different ways.
Speaker 1: But in order to create a robot that has the
Speaker 1: same degrees of freedom, you have to build in a
Speaker 1: lot of different systems for that to work. And then
Speaker 1: not just we're not just talking about mechanical systems, which
Speaker 1: are already that's complicated enough, right, to build a mechanical
Speaker 1: leg that can do that can move like a leg
Speaker 1: that one is not taking crazy amounts of power to operate,
Speaker 1: and two can still can still support the weight of
Speaker 1: the rest of the robot. But then you also have
Speaker 1: to build in the software sums that you are alluding
Speaker 1: to earlier, Joe, the software that can control the movements
Speaker 1: of this leg, that can can detect changes in the
Speaker 1: environment and react to it so that the robot maintains
Speaker 1: its balance and is able to continue forward. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is not easy to do, right. I'd imagine with legs
Speaker 1: it's more difficult to program stability. Like with a wheeled vehicle,
Speaker 1: it's just got static stability, So you just sit it
Speaker 1: down somewhere and it's stable. Um, if you have a
Speaker 1: creature with legs that's going to going to be lifting
Speaker 1: legs and stuff like that, it seems like there's more
Speaker 1: potential for it to fall over. You have to shift
Speaker 1: your weight every single time you take a step, and
Speaker 1: it's all incredibly automatic to most of us. But I mean,
Speaker 1: but that's why babies fall down all the time while
Speaker 1: they're trying to work that thing out, or puppies or
Speaker 1: adorable bust and Dynamics robots. Yeah. So so one thing
Speaker 1: we can probably get all the way is that bipedal
Speaker 1: robots that would be you know, used for space exploration
Speaker 1: probably not gonna happen anytime soon. There's no reason. I
Speaker 1: don't know why you need that now. I mean, the
Speaker 1: only reason I can argue is that people would probably
Speaker 1: have develop uh an emotional attachment to such a thing
Speaker 1: because it resembles us enough. But then we've seen people
Speaker 1: develop strong emotional attachments to the spirit and the curiosity rovers,
Speaker 1: so it's not like that's a prerequisite. No. When I'm
Speaker 1: imagining a rover with legs, I'm imagining probably a hexapod,
Speaker 1: like a like a six legged rover kind of like
Speaker 1: the Curiosity rover has six wheels, um, and I would
Speaker 1: imagine that something like that would probably have a more
Speaker 1: limited and narrow focus of locomotion, Like it would be
Speaker 1: something if you wanted to climb a mountain on Mars
Speaker 1: with a rover, that seems like that might be useful
Speaker 1: for that kind of thing. It's got these billy goat
Speaker 1: scrabbling legs, right that would like you see on real goats.
Speaker 1: That would be that would be uh, definitely a special
Speaker 1: case right there where because you're talking about a task
Speaker 1: that is particularly difficult for a wheeled rover. You would
Speaker 1: need to find something some alternative, right and uh, but
Speaker 1: you wouldn't use that same legged rover to roll across
Speaker 1: the expanse of Mars because it would be less efficient
Speaker 1: unless you could attach wheels to the ends of those legs.
Speaker 1: So what do you know, Yeah, there's actually a cool
Speaker 1: rover that does just that. Yes, things so creepy. So
Speaker 1: so this is called the Athlete, the all terrain hex
Speaker 1: limbed Extraterrestrial Explorer, And this is it's being billed as
Speaker 1: a vehicle which you might want to uh separate in
Speaker 1: your mind from totally robotic rover. But but nonetheless. Okay,
Speaker 1: so these things, if you've never seen a picture of them,
Speaker 1: they look like giant robotic insectoid wheelers like from from Oz.
Speaker 1: I was going to make that same compare Harrison that
Speaker 1: it was like the wheelers from Return to ozs, which
Speaker 1: is that's what they look like. Um. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: six articulated legs, each of which ends in a wheel. Um,
Speaker 1: And I mean really, the wheels are for the general
Speaker 1: all purpose getting around, and the legs are for if
Speaker 1: the thing encounters um any kind of difficult terrain, extreme
Speaker 1: terrain I think is the official NASA terminology about that.
Speaker 1: So the wheels can lock into place and act just
Speaker 1: like feet or hands essentially. But yeah, this thing is
Speaker 1: It's part spider, part wheeler from Return to Oz and
Speaker 1: all nightmare in my opinion. Um yeah, so there's that.
Speaker 1: And you can see why this would be useful, especially
Speaker 1: if legs can double as arms and you need to
Speaker 1: use them for army things. Uh, where's the king keep
Speaker 1: his armies in his sleevies? Alright? So moving on? What
Speaker 1: about this? Um, this ge go bot thing I'm seeing here?
Speaker 1: It was an interesting thing I saw. This is not
Speaker 1: for exploring planetary surfaces. But I did see it mentioned
Speaker 1: in the context of space for the from the s
Speaker 1: A And basically it's a crawling robot that makes use
Speaker 1: of biomimicry of the geckos gripping fingers. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're using like slightly larger versions of movie Spider
Speaker 1: Man's ability to climb. They've got these tiny hairs or
Speaker 1: spines or whatever you want to call them that um
Speaker 1: like dramatically increase its surface area, allowing it to cling
Speaker 1: to a surface. At a microscopic level. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: if you look at a geckos little fingertips and you
Speaker 1: were able to look at them on a nanoscopic level,
Speaker 1: you would see all these hairs, and those hairs would
Speaker 1: actually interact with material at an atomic level. So this
Speaker 1: is a level up from that. We're not talking atomic,
Speaker 1: we're talking micro Yeah, micro level, like molecular maybe, but
Speaker 1: it's it's definitely yeah, they're they're definitely larger than the
Speaker 1: nano hairs you would find on a geckos uh limbs,
Speaker 1: but they they have the same effect. They're enough so
Speaker 1: that the robot can support its own weight, right, And
Speaker 1: the cool thing about these as these this yes, a
Speaker 1: post points out is that they could work in space,
Speaker 1: unlike some like sticky adhesives. So imagine you want to
Speaker 1: fly around in your spacecraft or drive around on the
Speaker 1: surface of Mars with some kind of large vehicle that
Speaker 1: may require exterior repairs. This could like crawl around on
Speaker 1: the outside of the hull and do those repairs for
Speaker 1: you in low gravity. Sure right, and then feed more nightmares.
Speaker 1: So then we've got a Boston Dynamics. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: give up all these things give me nightmares. No, actually,
Speaker 1: I love Boston Dynamics is a weird mix of nightmares
Speaker 1: and total cuteness. It's it's nightmares and dreams at the
Speaker 1: same time. It's it's our favorite robotics company that also
Speaker 1: gives us the supreme willies. He usually doesn't give me
Speaker 1: nightmares until I see people kicking it and I'm just like,
Speaker 1: get up, okay. So Boston Dynamics is another company that
Speaker 1: has worked with DARPA, as we mentioned earlier, but they
Speaker 1: they've been creating uh lots of different kinds of robots,
Speaker 1: especially for military applications, seemingly for like transport. So there's
Speaker 1: the Big Dog and the wild Cat and These are
Speaker 1: four legged robots that they have programmed to run around
Speaker 1: or walk around in different kinds of terrain. And these
Speaker 1: things are really cool because of what they can do
Speaker 1: in terms of legged locomotion. Like they're they're they're pretty advanced.
Speaker 1: One of them, I remember, I don't remember which one
Speaker 1: it was. Now, is that the big dog that you
Speaker 1: just alluded to. Someone from the company goes up to
Speaker 1: it and shoves it with his foot and then it's
Speaker 1: already walking on a slippery i c. Surface. It starts
Speaker 1: to stumble and scrabble and like you would imagine an
Speaker 1: actual animal, and then it collects itself and continues to
Speaker 1: move I mean, albeit on this slippery surface. So and
Speaker 1: it does so apologetically, as if to say, please, sir,
Speaker 1: don't kick me again. We were all still upset about
Speaker 1: this video. It is deeply impacted. If you want to
Speaker 1: hear a lot more about Buston Dynamics and their robotic animals, um,
Speaker 1: we did a podcast and a video, both released on
Speaker 1: February nine, called Robot Pets and Robot Pets of the Future, respectively.
Speaker 1: If so so, go check those out if you want
Speaker 1: to hear a lot more about them. Now, I don't
Speaker 1: know if robots like this would have such a great
Speaker 1: use on a foreign planet. Maybe, but I I would
Speaker 1: have a few questions. One of them would be, so
Speaker 1: if you want to look at the advantages of of
Speaker 1: the stumbling robot that you know gets its balance after
Speaker 1: you've shoved it, I wonder number one, what use would
Speaker 1: that be on Mars unless you're expecting something to push it?
Speaker 1: And then and then number two extra nightmares, thanks Joe,
Speaker 1: is something I suspect but don't know for for sure.
Speaker 1: I think when you would design legs for stability, it's
Speaker 1: important to take into account the force of gravity, which
Speaker 1: would vary depending on the rover's location. So if you
Speaker 1: take something that's been designed to stumble and get its
Speaker 1: balance on Earth, I don't know if that would still
Speaker 1: work on like a low gravity and you would need
Speaker 1: to mechanically engineer the legs in such a way so
Speaker 1: that it could support the weight of the robot in
Speaker 1: whatever in environment it was going to operate in. So now,
Speaker 1: if it's going into a lower gravity environment, that's actually
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about making them stronger. Obviously,
Speaker 1: then in software you would probably have to adjust exactly
Speaker 1: how how much power it would send to all the
Speaker 1: different servos and motors that are involved in those legs.
Speaker 1: I imagine it could be done um, largely algorithmically, but
Speaker 1: I I that would just be hell on testing. Yeah
Speaker 1: it would. I mean, I'm not even sure that would
Speaker 1: be a problem. It just seems like it might be.
Speaker 1: I think the biggest the biggest question would be what
Speaker 1: would you need that kind of robot to do? And
Speaker 1: the only thing I could I could imagine is if
Speaker 1: you wanted to explore a region of Mars Mars where
Speaker 1: you knew that the the the ground was going to
Speaker 1: be very rocky, very difficult to traverse otherwise, and that
Speaker 1: you would need this ability for a robot that could
Speaker 1: study itself in case it stepped on something that gave way, right,
Speaker 1: rather than say a wheeled robot that might end up
Speaker 1: becoming part of a uh rock slide, maybe a legged
Speaker 1: robot that could catch itself. But um, you know that's
Speaker 1: that's complete just speculation. Okay, but here's another option. Let's
Speaker 1: go a little bit back in the wheel direction. So
Speaker 1: we we've seen there might be some good uses of legs,
Speaker 1: but it might be a more narrowly focused kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what about tank treads continuous tract locomotion. Yeah, the tracks
Speaker 1: are good for things like again, navigating really uh difficult terrain.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why we put them on tanks, because
Speaker 1: tanks would be driving across areas that needed you needed
Speaker 1: to have a lot of power, so there needs to
Speaker 1: be a lot of torque there. It also needed to
Speaker 1: be able to go over difficult areas. So it has
Speaker 1: some advantages, but those might be outweighed by the disadvantages. Well,
Speaker 1: I would imagine that they are better at loose soil, Yes,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have to worry. Yeah, so they are better
Speaker 1: at navigating through that. However, they also require more power.
Speaker 1: You have a lot more moving parts, so that is
Speaker 1: already an issue, right, it's not. It's not as simple
Speaker 1: as wheel and axle. So the more moving parts you have,
Speaker 1: the more opportunity there is for a mechanical failure, you know.
Speaker 1: So there's that. There's also the fact that you have
Speaker 1: usually a track of some sort that could become de
Speaker 1: threaded from that, and then in that case, you you've
Speaker 1: lost your ability to to push yourself forward and you're
Speaker 1: it's just like getting stuck in the loose soil. Except
Speaker 1: in this case you just lost the tread. Um they're
Speaker 1: able to turn, uh well, depending upon the nature of
Speaker 1: the treads, they're able to turn fairly tightly, but it
Speaker 1: takes a lot of energy to do it as opposed
Speaker 1: to a wheel. So turning anything that's on the least
Speaker 1: track systems is a laborious process, requires a lot of power.
Speaker 1: And also if you've designed the treads so that they're
Speaker 1: really really grippy, it may not turn so well because
Speaker 1: turning actually means that you have to create a skid
Speaker 1: right the it can't turn like a wheel thing where
Speaker 1: you can just start gradually introducing a turn. So it
Speaker 1: starts to curve over to the left or to the right.
Speaker 1: It has to start skidding itself to the left or
Speaker 1: right and then continuing forwards. It's not this natural kind
Speaker 1: of smooth curve and um. And again, if the material
Speaker 1: that you made the track out of, or if whatever
Speaker 1: it's traveling on is too grippy, then it can get stuck,
Speaker 1: not being able to turn left or right. Uh. This
Speaker 1: may just be because of the continuous track vehicles I'm
Speaker 1: familiar with, like bulldozers and tanks and stuff, But I
Speaker 1: would also tend to imagine that a design like that
Speaker 1: is probably heavy. Yeah, I'm a I'm not a I'm
Speaker 1: not an engineering expert with this kind of thing. Um,
Speaker 1: But but but I think the answer here is yes,
Speaker 1: is okay. Think think about a wheel system. All the
Speaker 1: mechanics that you need for it are a couple of
Speaker 1: axles and wheels have a relatively small surface area. Um.
Speaker 1: Part of the draw of continuous treads is that they
Speaker 1: have that larger surface area, but that's necessarily um, more
Speaker 1: material and therefore more weight. They're also driven by two
Speaker 1: or more wheels themselves, so you have at least as
Speaker 1: much interior mechanics as a wheel system. Um. However, I
Speaker 1: mean that that's the kind of thing that, although this
Speaker 1: applies to wheels as well, material science is going to
Speaker 1: help us improve in the future. So this leads me
Speaker 1: to a question for you, Joe, what if we could
Speaker 1: design a robot that on its own could propel itself
Speaker 1: without any sort of limbs or wheels. It actually moves
Speaker 1: itself some other way. So it's it's not it's not
Speaker 1: gripping the ground with legs, it's not turning wheels, it's
Speaker 1: not using tracks. The whole robot itself moves as a
Speaker 1: unit in some way. Jonathan, I want you to imagine something.
Speaker 1: Paint a picture with your words there, Joe. Okay, imagine
Speaker 1: a big old beach ball. Okay. Now imagine it is
Speaker 1: on a beach, tumbling over the sand blown by the wind. Okay,
Speaker 1: Now imagine it is full of scientific instruments that measure
Speaker 1: things about the environment. So far, typical day at the beach.
Speaker 1: Now imagine it's on Mars. Okay. Not. I posed this
Speaker 1: exact same scenario in a blog post. I wrote about
Speaker 1: something that is actually being designed that the Mars tumbleweed designs. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is an idea that that engineers have been
Speaker 1: talking about for a long time, the idea of a
Speaker 1: wind driven inflatable rover for use on Mars. It's pretty
Speaker 1: ingenious because you no longer have to dedicate a huge
Speaker 1: amount of work to creating a power system that can
Speaker 1: propel your your robot, because the robots being propelled by
Speaker 1: whatever wind happens to be present at the place where
Speaker 1: it's going. You can then dedicate whatever power systems you
Speaker 1: have just to the scientific instruments. And that conserves a
Speaker 1: lot of space and a lot of weight. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so there are a lot of potential advantages to inflatable
Speaker 1: rovers that blow with the wind. Number one, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: you were saying, you don't really need a drive system.
Speaker 1: You might want to have some kind of internal steering mechanism,
Speaker 1: but that would like you can have a counterweight that
Speaker 1: would still take advantage of the wind as the propulsion,
Speaker 1: but it would be kind of like a rudder on
Speaker 1: a ship, be steering in one direction or another. Um.
Speaker 1: But then again when you add that, you'd be adding weight,
Speaker 1: which would be cutting into what the wind can provide
Speaker 1: in terms of moving you. UM. And so one problem
Speaker 1: this would solve is that it would be very easy
Speaker 1: to land a vehicle like this and you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about it breaking upon impact with the surface.
Speaker 1: You just drop it down and it set down like
Speaker 1: a beach ball. So you can just imagine it being
Speaker 1: blown along on the surface, but not necessarily alone. You
Speaker 1: could also, potentially, I would think, use a system like
Speaker 1: this in a swarm search strategy. So if you wanted
Speaker 1: to send a whole bunch of beach balls up to
Speaker 1: Mars and they could fan out over the landscape and
Speaker 1: explore lots of different things, which would give you redundancy
Speaker 1: as well. If one of them breaks down or get stuck,
Speaker 1: it's not such a big deal. If you have a
Speaker 1: big inflatable beach ball that's exploring Mars, you can set
Speaker 1: it down. How would you do that just partially deflated? Yeah,
Speaker 1: take some of the air out of it, and then
Speaker 1: it sits down become stationary. Yeah. See your description of
Speaker 1: the swarm of of of these things just makes me
Speaker 1: think of every concert I went to in the eighties,
Speaker 1: just the air would be filled with these things, which
Speaker 1: just makes me think that we'd really be giving the
Speaker 1: Martians a great time. But I think it's cool the
Speaker 1: I mean, they're obviously. The biggest disadvantage you could argue
Speaker 1: is that, since you don't ultimate control the direction that
Speaker 1: this thing can go in, you're very much limited by
Speaker 1: whatever way the wind happens to be blowing. You're literally right. Well,
Speaker 1: you're also very limited in terms of the instrumentation you
Speaker 1: can carry, because it needs to be extremely lightweight in
Speaker 1: order to work. Like the Curiosity can take all kinds
Speaker 1: of arms and machines that do different tests. You would
Speaker 1: you would have much fewer options with something like this.
Speaker 1: You'd have to really pick what you want to go
Speaker 1: on there, and you'd have to find a way to
Speaker 1: make it very small and light and furthermore capable of
Speaker 1: working within this this beach ball capacity. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if you would be able to send a
Speaker 1: little scooper thing out into the sale right point, you
Speaker 1: might be able to have some sort of semi permeable
Speaker 1: membrane as the beach ball body, and then therefore he
Speaker 1: could take samples of like atmosphere examples that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: But then also there's the concern that if the ball
Speaker 1: encounters something like a valley, for example, and then gets
Speaker 1: to a point where it can't be blown further, it
Speaker 1: could get stuck very quickly. That's something that we don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about with these rovers, where we can
Speaker 1: actually maneuver them around or out of natural landscapes that
Speaker 1: would be otherwise um impossible to travel through. Right, I'm
Speaker 1: picturing just an entire army of these of these beach
Speaker 1: ball robots stuck in a single trench on Mars, and
Speaker 1: just think there'd be a cartoon of a Martian walking
Speaker 1: by saying, who the hell did this? Well, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about another spherical design, Please do So this
Speaker 1: other one I also talked about this in my my
Speaker 1: blog post about these, it's the Joel Bot. So this
Speaker 1: was the one that could actually jump right. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's still spherical. This was designed, by the way, in
Speaker 1: two thousand eight by PhD student named Rhodri ar Moore
Speaker 1: from the University of bath uh And so imagine sort
Speaker 1: of a spherical cage. It's just it's just an outline, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, think of think of your your beach ball,
Speaker 1: where you have the seams. There's a skeleton of a beach, right,
Speaker 1: there's nothing in between those those seams. It's just those
Speaker 1: are those are bands that that form a ball like shape.
Speaker 1: So so you're not going to have the same breeze
Speaker 1: driven technology that that beach ball example would um. But
Speaker 1: if if you get tension into those cage arms, you
Speaker 1: can allow it to um, to roll purposefully and also hop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so imagine through the middle of this spherical cage, you've
Speaker 1: got to you've got a rod that can compress like
Speaker 1: a spring, and then once you compress it far enough,
Speaker 1: it builds up potential energy to release suddenly and do
Speaker 1: a hopping action like a grasshopper. And so that could
Speaker 1: come in really handy. You can imagine if it were
Speaker 1: to get stuck or if it were to need to
Speaker 1: get over an obstacle. Yeah, there's something about this particular
Speaker 1: design that bothers me, but I'm going to save that
Speaker 1: because it actually applies to another robot on our list.
Speaker 1: In that way, I can just cover them all at once. Okay, Uh,
Speaker 1: there is something that I think is really cool. This
Speaker 1: is probably what you're talking about here, which is the
Speaker 1: robot based on the tin Segrety architecture. Yeah, it's called
Speaker 1: the super ball bot, and it has been under active
Speaker 1: research at NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. That's the nayak Niak.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's like Brainiac without the brains. True, So
Speaker 1: so i'll call it. I'll call it Brainiac. So this
Speaker 1: isn't Superman's enemy, it would just be Man's logic. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: well be your Man's fair enough. Yeah. So it's under
Speaker 1: the direction of a couple of guys named Vitas sun Spiral.
Speaker 1: I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly. Sun Spiral does seem
Speaker 1: to be the way it's spelled, and Adrian Ego Geno.
Speaker 1: It's based on this tin Segrety architecture. So imagine it's
Speaker 1: a roughly spherical shape, very roughly. Instead of seeing a
Speaker 1: spherical skin or a sphereical cage, imagine you're looking at
Speaker 1: like like a tangle of Christmas lights, except not really.
Speaker 1: It's it's more like poles and cables. So you've got
Speaker 1: these rods and then you've got these strings coming out
Speaker 1: the ends of them, and just staring at it sitting
Speaker 1: on the ground, it might look like some collapsed mess
Speaker 1: of just knodded up components. But once it starts to move,
Speaker 1: you realize that these cables connecting the ends of the
Speaker 1: rods can relax and contract, kind of like the muscles
Speaker 1: that control your skeleton very much. So, yeah, and so
Speaker 1: what this thing can do is it can buy this
Speaker 1: contracting and relaxing action, move itself along on the ground.
Speaker 1: It can cause itself to tumble forward on the landscape.
Speaker 1: It can also raise itself up a little bit by
Speaker 1: creating that tension. So you know, it's just imagine any
Speaker 1: kind of of structure that relies on on cables and rods,
Speaker 1: like a tent. That's an easy one to imagine. It's
Speaker 1: using tension to maintain that stability and really saying it's
Speaker 1: like our our muscles and bones is is pretty accurate
Speaker 1: if you think about it. Like when I when I
Speaker 1: tried to describe this to someone, I said, all right,
Speaker 1: we'll just imagine you have a mass of bones and
Speaker 1: muscle tissue that's all attached together and it's still able
Speaker 1: to relax and contract and move around that way. And
Speaker 1: they said, that's awful. I'm like, well, you need to
Speaker 1: watch these videos because even when they tend to be
Speaker 1: really sped up, the videos are are sped up quite
Speaker 1: a bit because this thing moves very slowly right now, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're still they're still learning to program its motion. And
Speaker 1: the way they're learning to program its motion, I think
Speaker 1: it's really cool. They're using an evolutionary simulator, so they're
Speaker 1: basically pitting UH control schemes against each other in a
Speaker 1: survival of the fittest simulated by the computer, and whichever
Speaker 1: one ends up coming out on top is the one
Speaker 1: they go with. So system like this can absorb shock,
Speaker 1: and that's one big advantage. You you can drop it
Speaker 1: on the surface of the planet without really worrying that's
Speaker 1: gonna break. Like if you just were to drop a
Speaker 1: rover on Mars that had wheels, I'm sure it would
Speaker 1: just shatter. So it absorbs shock and it can fold
Speaker 1: up for transport. This is a really interesting thing. It
Speaker 1: can just kind of like fold itself into a neat
Speaker 1: little triangle and uh, and can be deployed easily that way.
Speaker 1: It's lightweight, it's structurally robust, and it is capable of
Speaker 1: some very versatile motion potentially depending on how they manage
Speaker 1: the control scheme. Yeah, the thing that concerns me, and
Speaker 1: this was the other one that that made me think
Speaker 1: about my concern so for both this one and our
Speaker 1: cage bought friend. Uh, the issue I have is that
Speaker 1: I can imagine a system like this getting hung up
Speaker 1: on protrusions. So think of a really rocky surface and
Speaker 1: this thing is trying to get through. Like if you've
Speaker 1: ever warned anything that has any loops on it whatsoever,
Speaker 1: I guarantee it's some point you've walked past something and
Speaker 1: gotten hooked on it, and then you have to stop
Speaker 1: and you have to dislodge it and continue on your way. Um,
Speaker 1: or you just keep pulling, or you just keep pulling
Speaker 1: tell rips. If you're Joe and you're just Yolo, you
Speaker 1: just keep going, but for most of us we just
Speaker 1: you know it's I said to Joe earlier before we
Speaker 1: did the podcast, I said, I'm one of those people
Speaker 1: who if I have something that's got loops on it,
Speaker 1: it's gonna catch on something, probably sooner rather than later.
Speaker 1: If I were to ever actually attempt to catch something
Speaker 1: with a loop, I would never ever do it. Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully Murphy's law would apply less to this robot than
Speaker 1: it would to you, one would hope. But I'm thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, a really chaotic landscape. You could have a
Speaker 1: lot of potential for getting especially you're you're talking without
Speaker 1: lots of open space and then cables, so there's a
Speaker 1: lot of areas where cables could get hooked on things.
Speaker 1: And I could just imagine that that would end up
Speaker 1: causing a lot of uh frustration down the line. Not
Speaker 1: for the robot it doesn't care, but for the engineers
Speaker 1: who unless we program it to care less and feel
Speaker 1: bad about it, right like way kuld you move stupid um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean the idea that you would have
Speaker 1: to waste time and energy to free it from whatever
Speaker 1: it happened to get caught on. That's the to me,
Speaker 1: that's the biggest potential um problem here is that this
Speaker 1: it has the potential of getting hooked up on lots
Speaker 1: of different stuff. I can see that, though I also
Speaker 1: at the same time think, well, mostly what it would
Speaker 1: be encountering I'd imagine would be like sand and then
Speaker 1: some rocks, and there might be like some really craggy rocks.
Speaker 1: I can see it getting hung up on, but in general,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be running into like deer antlers
Speaker 1: or protruding nails or yeah, yeah, you guys just don't
Speaker 1: hang out in the right parts of marrows. Apparently not
Speaker 1: think yeah, yeah, the antler valley is not the one
Speaker 1: that I visit all that it's too it's too hell,
Speaker 1: he's over from that one that's filled with all the
Speaker 1: beach balls. Is that what you keep getting your loops
Speaker 1: caught on, Jonathan is an Yeah, No, it does happen
Speaker 1: more frequently than I care to admit. Al Right, guys,
Speaker 1: do we have any other examples? Well, one is something
Speaker 1: that I can't find in any way has been mentioned
Speaker 1: with reference to space, so it may be completely not Germane.
Speaker 1: But it's so cool that I just wanted to bring
Speaker 1: it up as a possibility when we're talking about a
Speaker 1: whole body rolling robots like these spherical robots. Is the
Speaker 1: More Facts, which is a transforming hexapod robot built by
Speaker 1: a Norwegian guy named Cary Haliverson. Yep, this one's a
Speaker 1: really cool one. It looks like when it's when it's
Speaker 1: completely all the limbs are pulled in, it looks like
Speaker 1: a ball. Yeah, you know, it looks like it looks
Speaker 1: like kind of a semi opaque whitish ball. Uh and
Speaker 1: then and then things start moving. Yeah. It So it's
Speaker 1: a spherical hybrid robot with twelve curved triangular panels. So
Speaker 1: imagine a globe and then draw lines through it, separating
Speaker 1: it into six curve triangles on top and six curved
Speaker 1: triangles on the bottom, slices of pie. And now imagine
Speaker 1: these little slices of pie can unfurl and turn into
Speaker 1: the legs fold out and turn into legs like little
Speaker 1: crab legs. So this is a robotic D twelve that's
Speaker 1: kind of kind of except it doesn't have flat surfaces.
Speaker 1: It's it's actually round on the outside, so it's more
Speaker 1: like a D one hundred. If you've ever seen one
Speaker 1: of those, you know, not the D tens. Okay, Uh,
Speaker 1: it really saves you time when you have to roll percentages.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying. So this this robot has a couple
Speaker 1: of different ways of creating locomotion. One is that it
Speaker 1: can unfold its legs, and it does end up having
Speaker 1: six legs that way, the top six panels remain kind
Speaker 1: of closed in, although they can't open up a little
Speaker 1: bit too, but the bottom six panels open up to
Speaker 1: be legs, and then it moves around kind of like
Speaker 1: a crab. Like it's very crab, like a plastic crab.
Speaker 1: That sounds amazing and creepy. Now, if it folds up
Speaker 1: into a ball, it can actually just flex the legs
Speaker 1: a little bit, pushing the panels outward and thus rolling
Speaker 1: the ball forward, so it can either roll or crawl. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so what this actually reminded me of was one
Speaker 1: of the rovers, one of the actual rovers we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier athlete, which combined the leg action and the
Speaker 1: rolling action, except in that case it was wheels on
Speaker 1: the end of legs. Right, This would be a combination
Speaker 1: of climbing leg abilities with whole body rolling abilities. So
Speaker 1: you can easily imagine like using something like this to
Speaker 1: climb up a hill, for example, to get a look
Speaker 1: around the hill and see where does it want to
Speaker 1: go from there, and then doing a controlled roll down
Speaker 1: the other side of the hill, because that would be
Speaker 1: far more efficient than climbing back down. You know, It's
Speaker 1: it's not something again, like Joe was saying, it's not
Speaker 1: something that is specifically being hailed as a future in
Speaker 1: in Rover robot addicts, but it was it's something that
Speaker 1: sparked our our imagination. Yeah, well, we're just saying, take
Speaker 1: a look at this thing. Get a load of this
Speaker 1: thing over here. It's pretty interesting and slightly less terrifying
Speaker 1: than athlete was. I think athlete is perfectly cuddly. Do
Speaker 1: you I would wrap my arms around one of those legs.
Speaker 1: We're gonna make you watch the return to oz uh
Speaker 1: the sequence with the wheelies in a minute, and then
Speaker 1: you know or wheelers I guess is what they're called.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, those are scary. Well anyway, that's that's generally
Speaker 1: the types of locomotion that we wanted to look at.
Speaker 1: There are other options as well. In fact, I've seen
Speaker 1: some interesting robotics with that end up emulating the movements
Speaker 1: of snakes or fish, Yeah, so there are definitely other
Speaker 1: other means of locomotion, but these are the ones we
Speaker 1: think are probably the most likely. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: I'll be amazed if anything overtakes the wheel anytime really soon.
Speaker 1: But it's it's fun to kind of stretch our minds
Speaker 1: in this way. And if we ever get to a
Speaker 1: point where some of these considerations are no longer as important,
Speaker 1: things like you have to worry about how much power
Speaker 1: the locomotion is going to consume, then who knows, I mean,
Speaker 1: then you then you really open up the door. And
Speaker 1: now I don't see that changing anytime in the near future,
Speaker 1: but it's also a possibility. So I like, like Joe
Speaker 1: said the very top of this podcast, this is just
Speaker 1: scratching the surface even of robotic locomotion. And uh, then
Speaker 1: there are all those other elements that are related back
Speaker 1: to that DARPA challenge I mentioned at the very beginning
Speaker 1: that we could go on and on about and we'll
Speaker 1: probably do more episodes about some of the big problems
Speaker 1: in robotics today and how people are going about addressing
Speaker 1: that and and meeting those challenges. I think there there's
Speaker 1: plenty of opportunity to talk about that but if there's
Speaker 1: something about the future you want to hear about specifically,
Speaker 1: and maybe it has nothing to do with robots at all,
Speaker 1: let us know. Send us a message our email addresses
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Speaker 1: and we will talk to you again really soon. For
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