I wonder what they could do with modern computers and modern materials science. They would at least save a bunch of weight for the computers carried.
The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
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Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#12I just watched an interview with Vijay Kumar who worked on that robot when he was a graduate student and talks about it for a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsLTNXMl1Q&t=0m58s
The whole 1 hour interview is also interesting.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#13Only millions? Amazing! To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
Millions seems about right. If it took more than $999 million I’d be pretty surprised. Hydraulics are tricky but they’re not that tricky.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#14I know someone who worked on a big radial hexapod robot for dod recently, and he said everyone involved in the project felt it was pointless (hexapods are just not a good platform for doing much of anything), but it was well-funded so they did their best.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#15Only millions? Amazing! To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
$5m by 1985, with another $3.5m earmarked [1]. Accounting generously for inflation, that's $25m today [2]. It would be interesting to know what the price would look like if they tried the same thing today.
[1] https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1985/11/4/the-pentagon-f...
[2] https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1981-to-present-valu...
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#16Only millions? Amazing! To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them.
DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#17Only millions? Amazing! To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.
I don't think the technology behind it was particularly new or novel. It was simply arranging known technology to a new application.
Given the lack of research, but perhaps the high experimentation, millions make sense.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#18I have many books on on robotics and AI from Stanford and MIT from that era, back when I started to get deeply involved in the field. My son is about a year away from graduating with degrees in CS and Robotics. He was quite surprised to realize that much of what he is learning today isn't new at all. Tremendous work was done decades ago in both domains. Put simply, you can only get so far with neural networks when your only option is an 8 bit microprocessor with 64k-bytes of RAM and a a megabyte or two of non-volatile storage.
One of the key differences between now and then is the monumental improvement in computing power, sensors, hardware in general and energy storage. As a result the devices we produce today look far more impressive. Think about it this way: I don't think there's anything in a Roomba that did not exist in the 1980's other than far greater computing power at a very low cost.
It is an interesting exercise to look through the Old Robots site (www.theoldrobots.com). One of my favorite's (because I owned one and still have a couple of arms on the shelf) is the Hero 2000:
http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html
Check out the specifications here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)
It took an Intel 8088 processor and 11 Z-80 8 bit processors to run this thing in the early 90's. That cost thousands of dollars. Today you can to a thousand times more with a $5 to $30 single chip processor.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#19I love it. Tachikomas!
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#20I just watched an interview with Vijay Kumar who worked on that robot when he was a graduate student and talks about it for a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsLTNXMl1Q&t=0m58s The whole 1 hour interview is also interesting.
Went to Penn and had no idea! On a related note Vijay's students are really bright, and he's quite a savvy administrator.