Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #00313



To: alt-beam@egroups.com
From: Jean auBois aubois@trail.com
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 10:50:16 -0700
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: F-F-F-F-Feedback


Forgive me, but I find this all to be exceedingly ironic. Not only do you
have to mistreat the drivers by putting resistors across them, but -now-
there is this requirement that the motors be "efficient" (although no one
has come up with a decent way of measuring "efficiency" and I happen to
think the "the rotor spins easily with no 'chugging'" a load of hogwash.)

It seems to me that this elusive "implex" effect (not that I've ever seen
anyone produce an argument that shows why/how it is useful to the robot) is
requiring an increasingly restrictive situation to exist; otherwise one
will just have to make do with limit switches (as an engineer, this strikes
me as being horridly crude -- I thought this BEAM stuff was supposed to be
elegant) and centering springs (nearly the same comment).

I find two huge problems with all of this:

a) this technology is supposed to be "adaptive". If it is so
SELF-adaptive, why are stopgap fixups like limit switches and centering
springs even necessary? Why do so many people find that the legs on their
robots drift in the first place? One would think that the very first
benefits of adaptiveness would be that the robot would operate properly.
Being adaptive with regard to terrain is only of importance if the legs
don't jam.

b) for any technology to succeed in a big way, it can't be terrifically
"fussy". The stuff has to be fairly easy to build, it has to work when it
is built, it has to work well in the field. The number of people who have
actually succeeded at getting this stuff to work is actually rather small
-- chances are that less than fifty people in the entire world have built
working walkers

Then there is the question of the usefulness of this stuff. Quite often
things like "cleaning house" or "explosive mine removal" are used... but
for the first, the only person who claims that this has worked for him is
Tilden and then only in the past tense; as for the latter, the people who
were funding Mark on a research basis aren't doing it anymore.


Zoz


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