All that money won't spend itself!!
The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
141–150 of 173 posts
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)
You might enjoy the book "The Entrepreneurial State" by Mariana Mazzucato makes a similar argument that a lot of innovation is actually driven by the state, because they can afford to invest a lot in research without an immediate payoff. The author mentions DARPA in particular as a great example of the US stimulating innovation that then later benefits companies. For example, while the iPhone is a great piece of inno…
There's also a very good book by Bill Janeway (of Wargburg Pincus notoriety) on the same subject called 'Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State'.
He argues the same point about the states roll in RnD (also explicitly calls out DARPA) and also their role in booms and busts.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing you aren't from the U.S. but in the southern U.S. growing newer species of Pine (variants of Loblolly Pine). A standard lease is 20 years from seedling to harvest, some older variants can go 30 to 50, but you don't see that being planted any longer and that's all leases maturing. And here, I can assure you they are very much mono culture, evenly spaced, engineered species of trees, almost nothing else ha…
Yes they used to do forestry like that in Northern Europe. They realised the methods described by the OP are more sustainable and more reliable (e.g. diseases will wipe out monocultures).
I agree with it being better for the world in a lot of ways. And I would like to see it change, but it isn't likely to, at least not for a really long time.
P.S. As for mono culture timber, there is a reason almost no one in the US knows what a curant is. They (are/were) illegal in the US, because they are for a vector for a fungus that can wipe out timber pines.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The kinematics are the tricky part. Trajectory planning is still quite difficult today even with our speedy modern CPUs
Trajectory planning what? Actually solving the inverse kinematics of 3dof manipulators is trivial. I did so 20 years ago using a Basic Stamp microcontroller for my 18 servo hexapod. I was 15.
Planning foot placement is a bit harder but I would say the compute heavy part today would be perception.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#145Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…
Why didn't they also put wheels under the harvester for road travel? I'm guessing that'd massively complicate things...
Would have been a good idea for towing to a site though. They wouldn't need to be powered.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really accurate. It depends on the tree type, but the growth cycle is somewhere between 50 to 100 years for optimal results. It's true that most forests today are not old growth anymore. They have been cut (usually clear cut) and then either replanted or just naturally reseeded and are now essentially waiting for the next cut. There are some areas where they are monocultural tree farms with not much else g…
I'm guessing you aren't from the U.S. but in the southern U.S. growing newer species of Pine (variants of Loblolly Pine). A standard lease is 20 years from seedling to harvest, some older variants can go 30 to 50, but you don't see that being planted any longer and that's all leases maturing. And here, I can assure you they are very much mono culture, evenly spaced, engineered species of trees, almost nothing else ha…
"See the issue is, at least in the southern U.S. they clear cut nearly everything in the 1800s. There is very little old growth left."
I pity them. Real forest is something very different, than a wood farm.
With the recent droughts and dying out of the monoculture spruce, more and more mixed forest is coming back to europe. Idealism brought a little change, but the big drive was the huge economical loss of the timber industry that forced them to rethink how to do things.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#147Anybody else thinking of the walkers from star wars when reading the headline? I was a bit disappointed seeing the size as it promises "giant" which does not really live up to star wars size expectations.. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Walker
Well, not that kind of "giant", but I was thinking about Ghost in the shell's tachikomas and fuchikomas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachikoma
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-IsysrqUlU (original tank fight scene, may spoil it a bit).
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#148Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?
If you go to the Clone Wars you'll see vehicles with six legs that look a lot closer to this one!
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really accurate. It depends on the tree type, but the growth cycle is somewhere between 50 to 100 years for optimal results. It's true that most forests today are not old growth anymore. They have been cut (usually clear cut) and then either replanted or just naturally reseeded and are now essentially waiting for the next cut. There are some areas where they are monocultural tree farms with not much else g…
I'm guessing you aren't from the U.S. but in the southern U.S. growing newer species of Pine (variants of Loblolly Pine). A standard lease is 20 years from seedling to harvest, some older variants can go 30 to 50, but you don't see that being planted any longer and that's all leases maturing. And here, I can assure you they are very much mono culture, evenly spaced, engineered species of trees, almost nothing else ha…
Ok, but that's still not 10 years.
There is a middle ground between the monoculture you describe and old growth. You can have an intact ecosystem with something every biologist would call "forest" even if you now and then strategically harvest some trees. We are almost 8bn people on this planet and we can't make do without lumber. All alternatives are much worse. Want to use plastic for everything? Steel? Concrete? We need to find a sustainable middle ground.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#150Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know. The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be…
I have seen working walking Timberjack models in Ohio I have pics from early 2000s someplace of fresh painted unit standing in the woods getting ready to clear some dead forest to stop all the wildfires we where having.