In the words of our master Bruce Lee, 'Be as water, my friend.' Water takes the shape of anything it enters. - Whatever situation life puts you in, embrace it and adapt - Don't remain stiff.
NEOs feet have "kettlebell inertias of 0.2kg, 100x less, but Bruce still wins with 0!
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20 years ago this year ASIMO 2004 launched and is still seemingly state of the art. Why did it fail?
🧵The Bandwidth Dilemma: Understanding Human Biomechanics to Build Better Robots
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Animals are masters of adaptability and compliance. We are purpose-built to move fast with minimum energy so we can collide safely. All we do is collisions, picking up a cup, taking a step, grabbing that door handle, and we are not fast enough to react to sense of touch and stop
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Kinetic Energy is 1/2*(m*v^2+I*w^2). Notice the velocities are squared. That's why, in nature, nothing ever moves faster than it has to. ASIMO has motors with 100:1 reducers, rotating 100x the joint speeds, that's 10.000 times the energy. Think of a big flywheel spinning up
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So when ASIMO is running, we can compute the rough equivalent inertia of the spinning flywheel to its foot. It works out to about 20kg. So it's running around with a 20kg kettlebell strapped to each foot (why robots walk weird and are unsafe) and roughly 10kg to each hand.
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Not a problem right? We can just be fast enough to stop when touching something? Well, if we move slow or know where everything is we kinda can. This works in the lab, but the real world is hard and unpredictable.
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ASIMO can do tiny jumps on 1 foot and have a small flight phase when running, an immense feat of engineering given the amount of energy that needs to be disipated at every hop, the "flywheel needs to instantly stop" when the foot hits.
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Hats of to Honda who perfected this approach to robotics way ahead of its time. Sadly Honda discontinued ASIMO in 2018, after producing around 100 units, it never managed to leave the lab.
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1X designs our androids with tendons, loosly inspired by human muscles, based on our actuators that are now 80% the density of muscle. Intelligence lies as much in the dynamics of our bodies as in our brain.
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Bonus:
How fast are we humans really?
-Visual Reflexes: 150-250 ms (5hz)
-Auditory Reflexes: 140-160 ms (6.7hz)
-Touch Reflexes: 100-150 ms (10hz)
-Local reflex (muscle bandwidth): 25 ms (40hz)
Effective bandwidth for controlling touch/collisions:
100-250 ms (4-10hz)
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