Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #10840
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "Dennison Bertram" dibst11+@pitt.edu
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 03:26:31 -0800
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: BEAM: Tendency toward miniaturization
> And variations on the theme don't seem to show as much promise (and aren't
> as cool to look at as) Spyder.
> And it can't walk so well (it looks ridiculous, and takes forever).
> If you have a controller for a Spyderish walker made out of bicores, it
> ought to exhibit better walking ability.
> It should, as far as I can see, walk more like an actual lifeform, moving
> more than one leg at once
I don't know about that. Spyder was just too complicated. If you look at the
robot's construction, it's some serious peice of enginnering. If you read
DAve's little bio about the robot, he say's it's suspension system was so
nice that you could actually bounce the robot up and down on it's legs.
Ouch! in addition, Mark T likes simplicity. The fact is that a two motor
walker can just walk better than spyder can. Such spyder looks cooler, but
that's not exactly what Mr. T is looking for. Anyway, as Mark say's himself,
it's unlikely that another such spyder will ever be build. I know rich was
trying to build one, I haven't heard about his project but I suspect he will
run into his own difficulties with his design. One of the points I try to
make sometimes is that if your going to start building larger robots, your
going to start to have to do some enginnering. We seriously can't just
'scale up' our robots. They aren't going to work like that, we can overlook
so many things when we build our small insect like robots. Maybe huge
nervous nets will provide an answer, but the inbetween stages of moderaly
large nets, probably won't show any evidence of being usefull, and more than
likely just discourage people. It will be the extremes that show any
usefullness. (my predicition)
dennison
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