Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#31

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

0_____0 wrote: post #30
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #6

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…

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 fron…

You’d have to be pretty quick off the mark to respond with:

Shibboleth? Isn’t that still in private beta?

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#32

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

0_____0 wrote: post #30
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #6

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…

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 fron…

The 4kW laser cutter I operate at my regular employment is aptly named by the manufacturer:

The Laser

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#33

Post by 0_____0 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #31
0_____0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fron…

You’d have to be pretty quick off the mark to respond with: Shibboleth? Isn’t that still in private beta?

I realized after a while that any name I made up would invariably be an actual JS package, perhaps even a full fledged framework. Shibboleth is in fact v0.1.4, available via npm. https://www.npmjs.com/package/shibboleth

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#34

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

0_____0 wrote: post #33
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d have to be pretty quick off the mark to respond with: Shibboleth? Isn’t that still in private beta?

I realized after a while that any name I made up would invariably be an actual JS package, perhaps even a full fledged framework. Shibboleth is in fact v0.1.4, available via npm. https://www.npmjs.com/package/shibboleth

Baaaaahaha

0_____0‘s Law of Software Framework Names

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#35

Post by fh973 »

Torkel wrote: 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.

Can you do without an encoder for legs? Maybe attach an IMU like you do for gimbals? Or measure current?

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#36

Post by Torkel »

colordrops wrote: post #28
Torkel wrote: 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?

Here are two:

MIT Cheetah: https://biomimetics.mit.edu/

Unitree/laikago: http://www.unitree.cc/

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#37

Post by Torkel »

fake-name wrote: post #27
Torkel wrote: 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.

Sure. I should have written "rc-servo". But in this context it was not ambiguous and the point stands - anything that uses rc-servos is a dead end. Personally I'm also skeptical of series elastic actuators - it seems like a half-assed solution where the proper solution is to embrace full direct-drive digital control of electrical force conversion.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#38

Post by Torkel »

numpad0 wrote: post #25
modeless wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not that rc-servos are not sexy. It't that they suck. For a number of specific reasons well listed in other posts here.

RC-servos are very cheap and very easy to use, so there are many projects using them. But there is no way to make a good robot out of them. It's a local maximum.

Re: Venom: All Terrain Autonomous Quadruped

#39

Post by Torkel »

fh973 wrote: post #35
Torkel wrote: 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.

Can you do without an encoder for legs? Maybe attach an IMU like you do for gimbals? Or measure current?

No. For these motors to do their job at these low speeds you need to know where the windings are relative to the magnets so you can apply a controlled force instantaneously.

Btw, this is true for gimbals too, and good gimbals use sensors.

Post reply on HN