Prof. Jimmy Or's been developing humanoid robots for years. His special sauce is to make flexible-spined models that can walk without support or suspension, a feat no other researcher has yet publicly matched. He's far from the only boffin in the field to focus on the sexy, but uneconomical area of androids: anthropomophized machines.
Tomotaka Takahashi of Team Osaka, which specializes in giving robots smooth, fluid locomotion ("Robots whose motions are too rational are unnatural," he says) is interviewewd by Waziwawi.com:
While Jimmy Or and others concentrate on flexible-spine models and Team Osaka on attractive movement, Prof. Florentin Woergetter has constructed a fast-striding model based on the word of a 1930s physiologist, Nikolai Bernstein.
RunBot, a learning, bipedal robot, moves as fast as a human, proportionally to its small size: three long steps a second. It uses a similiar approach to Or's work: instead of having the "brain" do the work, it uses hardcoded patterns of movement similar to those encoded in the nervous systems of animals. Just as in nature, the brain only gets involved when a change in gait, direction or other aspect of the motion is required.
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