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Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

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21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#21
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Why are they a dead end?

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#22
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Why are they a dead end?

Too slow, too weak, too inefficient, too much backlash, not backdrivable, no energy regeneration, no built in force sensing.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the front page at the moment are projects named: Bear - minimal blogging platform - it's a play on bare Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain? Zoox - self-driving-car tech - half the other self-driving-car companies have nonsense names Facebook - I still find this a smart name for the service Looking Glass - 3D display - confused me for a second with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_ser…

> Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain? More like a [venomous] spider than a snake I think.

Obvious now you point it out.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they a dead end?

Too slow, too weak, too inefficient, too much backlash, not backdrivable, no energy regeneration, no built in force sensing.

They aren’t sexy, isn’t that it — you want a sexy robot and RC servos don’t cut it

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#27
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

A brushless motor with an encoder and a feedback loop is a servo. It's just not a crappy integrated RC model servo motor assembly.

The (ab)use of the term "servo" is a major pet-peeve of mine.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#28
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Could you provide some examples of these projects?

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#29
post #19

It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo. The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.

Could you provide some examples of these projects?

Stanford Doggo: https://nathankau.com/Research https://github.com/Nate711/StanfordDoggoProject

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#30
post #5

Cool project! Code is quite easy to follow, IMO. Somewhat off-topic, but I find the name somewhat amusing. I would never seriously hold a name against a project, but I’m always curious when one is named something a bit...edgy, without an obvious reason - and at the expense of making it harder to find!

On the front page at the moment are projects named: Bear - minimal blogging platform - it's a play on bare Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain? Zoox - self-driving-car tech - half the other self-driving-car companies have nonsense names Facebook - I still find this a smart name for the service Looking Glass - 3D display - confused me for a second with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_ser…

Meanwhile in hardware we're sitting around with German-esque word trains like Multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC), successive-approximation to digital converter (SAR-ADC), parallel-multidimensional digital signal processing (mD-DSP).

It seems to be the software engineering world, out of all the engineering disciplines, that loves to draw upon fanciful names the most.

I used to troll an old housemate who was in web frontend by making up framework names. "Oh you're using Node.JS? Was talking to someone who's migrating to Polenta, with Shibboleth on the backend." He never did quite catch on.

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