Ivan Sutherland worked on something like this. Seems related?
http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1983-six-legged-hy...
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
#22Only 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.
Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#23Oh, 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 able to get the thing home by manual control of the actuators if the computers crashed. It's not towable; you'd need a crane and a flatbed.
It could only walk on flat ground. It was supposed to be able to cross a ditch, but that was manual. The driver had to drive it up to the ditch and stop. Then lock five legs, and, using a joystick, move one of the leading legs across the ditch and set it down. Then, with support in place, move the vehicle forward slightly with no leg lifts. Then lock five legs again, and place the second forward leg. Repeat until all six legs had made it across.
Cool, but not useful.
In the 1990s, a company in Finland got this right.[1] They built a six-legged walking timber harvester. It's impressive. Deere bought the company But it's not better than 8-wheel articulated timber harvesters [2], so it was never produced as a product.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#24I 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 yo…
And speaking of legged robots, this interesting bot showed-up in the early '80's. I remember it well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX9iRw33OE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHoJ2naN5HI
Again, considering available computing power, sensors, etc., this was nothing short of amazing.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#25...and so Star Wars AT-TE idea was born? :D
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#26Only 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.
What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago.
They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#27I 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.
I would not be surprised if Boston Dynamics scaled up their dog to truck size rather sooner than later.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#28Looks really cool and futuristic. I'm sure something much better and faster could be built today, but wheeled/tracked machines are still superior.
It's actually impressive how versatile wheels are - a legged truck would have to move much faster and be able to cross some extreme terrain to be a better choice than something with 4+ big wheels.
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.
[deleted]
Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago. They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.
That's the choice of your fellow citizens who'd rather spend money on weapons than feed people, and will come up with elaborate stories about why your uncle deserves to be in that position. :(