Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #04777



To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "John A. deVries II" zozzles@lanl.gov
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 10:37:40 -0600
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Ah! Blessed Skepticism! (was: Feedback explained?)


At 03:33 AM 6/22/99 , Ben Hitchcock wrote:
>True, for CONSTANT battery voltages. But what happens if the walker is
>happily walking away, and in the middle of a step.
...
>Let's say it decreases to 2.8 volts. (That's a bit exaggerated, but it
>serves to illustrate a point.)

All this argumentation is pointless. I find it ironic that once "implex"
as a mechanism was deprecated because motor drivers tend to isolate the
motor from the nervous net, this "battery droop" hypothesis has come into
vogue and is being held onto for dear life.

HAS ANYONE
ACTUALLY MEASURED IT?

Ok, sure, people have -some- sort of qualitative observations indicating
that a nervous net robot acts differently when a leg is stuck than when
they the legs are free, but NO ONE seems to have made any repeatable
experiments that either support or deny any particular hypothesis.

Until someone comes up with quantitative, repeatable measurements, I'm not
going to -believe- in any hypothesis as a "theory".


Zoz


---------------------------------------------------------------
John A. deVries II
zozzles@lanl.gov

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