This reminds me of walking forest harvester prototypes invented and produced in the 90's by Finnish technology company Timberjack and later bought and discontinued by John Deere... The idea was to make harvester that is more gentle to forest floor. The models were quite complete but Deere (who now owns the patents) decided to not start the mass production and instead used some balancing technologies from the prototypes in their more traditional wheeled harvesters. The walking Timberjack harvester prototype is on display at some John Deere factory or museum
The first car was slow, and dumb and clunky. You have already made progress far past that of speed, speed can be improved down the line. Amazing work man!
If it went with turbine power, say something like one of the fuel pumps on the space shuttle, and if they could design some kinf of energy recovery system into the hydraulics, like a regenerative braking kind of thing to recover energy, then I would imagine it would be quite fast, and maybe even able to jump like a spider. Consider a pogo stick. The power of one person is enough to move at a decent speed, and it's capable of very high jumps but that is because the spring in it is constantly re-absorbing energy, and then re-using it so all the person has to do is put enough energy back into it to account for friction.
Maybe instead of trying to keep everything rigid, there might be an approach involving tensegrity that would allow higher speed without higher weight. It's a field that is still in its infancy though.
This is the first time I've seen this, and it's awesome. I know of two other failed major hexapod robots, Project Hexapod and their Stompy, and the Hacksmith Industries and their spider mech. This is a serious undertaking, and I'm glad it was proven possible.
Am I getting the wrong end of the stick? The elaborate systems he describes seem pointless in a machine that moves at glacial speed. What is the point of putting effort into a tailored version of Linux when you could use a standard one? Speed? Boot time? Not heard of ssd and flash storage of state? I reckon a single 8-bit arduino could handle the motion, but not the user interface, which he more or less says is an add on. Generally, scaling up in physical size affects mechanical properties, not informatics.
Its all about engine, oil, hydrolic system temprature, pressure etc. Calculating values relative to each other. Things got too complicated. So scaling out as he was scaling up.
Indeed physics is a bitch when you want a legged vehicle bigger and faster. The power needed to swing the legs grows exponentially, the sensitivity and speed of various sensors needs to go up, the demand on the mechanic rigidity of the links and joints also goes up in turn upping the mass and so the needed power to move each leg again goes up....
It also the design of the legged vehicle , the OSU adaptative suspension vehicle was faster than this one despite being way older due to the design of the legs being more akin to a quadruped with extra legs rather than a spider , and spider type of body works when is something small rather than something big
I would like to see how it really performs in a robotically hostile environment (loose objects, trees, aggressive inclines,;fluids). Military applications aside possible uses in rescue?
If you need a beefy modular battery to replace that noisy engine, contact me. I can hook you up with something serious, currently being used by e-formula teams.
Jaimie experimented with giant mechanical spider and he successfully sold toy version of his invention to some company and got bunch of money to start new and exciting life in some paradise island and now he intents new tings. So not quite the same story in the end, but almost; both men seem to be happy and enthusiastic with stuff they do...
If you were to scale up the Australian tiger beetle (C. hudsoni) to the size of Mantis and it could still move at 171 body lengths per second then it would be able to move at 2 585 km/hr (1 606 mi/hr). Talk about disappointing, thanks physics.
2:50 What I hear is "Security through obscurity". Which is probably alright for something that's on for 15 minutes at a time and most people don't want to steal, but still, for a machine that big (and therefore able to hurt you if it does the wrong thing), you might want something better.
It has an emergency stop button. And sure it's a powerful dangerous machine, just like any easily acquired car. If someone went on a rampage with it though, and he wasn't inside to E-stop it. Just think of the awesome action movie scene that would unfold as he battles with this 1 mph machine trying to disable it as only he knows how. We can only hope someone has a camera on him if that happens
Ladies and gentelmen, this is how serious dedication looks like. Absolutely amazing. Excatly, it's not about speed. It's about it. Someone, give this guy something like bilion (10^24) € and team of people of his choosing. I have feeling he might build something beyond amazing. And with practical usage.
Need to switch to foot controls for navigation and general operation, add a pair of force-feedback waldo controls and a pair of huge pincers, and a head tracker to control posture (cab position and orientation relative to the feet), and make it a proper mech.
