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sohkamyung

DIY Bipedal Robot Used Pneumatic "Air-Muscles" Instead of Motors spectrum.ieee.org

shermantanktop2 hours ago

This is what non-commercial tech looked like back before the gold rush and vulture capital. Geeks and nerds in basements doing weird stuff that would be laughed at by most people on the street. Most STEM professions were middle class, not lottery tickets.

falsaberN12 hours ago

Makes perfect sense, in nature you have a lot of both practical and odd functionality out of filling "bags" with air or liquid.

This is a pretty cool approach. If they can improve the visual presentation it can also look pretty awesome. Gives me some inspiration for drawing scifi designs too.

chocrates8 minutes ago

Liquid seems like a better approach from an engineering standpoint because it is non compressible. But then I imagine dealing with liquid is more of a pain than air.

giantg24 hours ago

I would love to see this with nitinol wire muscles.

mhb4 hours ago

Power use would be immense and it would be insanely slow.

jrflo2 hours ago

Considering 90%+ of the input energy goes to heat with NiTi actuators, Your walking robot would also double as a great space heater.

giantg23 hours ago

Power use might be high depending on configuration, but speed shouldn't be that slow using capacitors. Sufficiently strong pneumatics tend to require quite a bit of power too.

NalNezumi7 hours ago

I opened the article expecting it was going to be about clone robotics https://youtu.be/5mSE6Tkhy4g?si=tDp0DUI9OOXAwsX2

henry20233 hours ago

Nightmare fuel

asn_tech_20198 hours ago

Cool... their biggest failure pushed them to find what they are actually good at.

Markoff8 hours ago

It's robot from 1990 and no, there is no video of the robot actually walking.

bitwize9 hours ago

A guy named Walker developing legged-robot software is even more on the nose than a guy named Karpathy developing autonomous-vehicle software.

psytortilla_8 hours ago

Oh my god, how have I never noticed Karpathy and Car-Path-y? Amazing!