Why do we have the assumption that industrial robots need to have legs? The largest grocery store chain uses picker robots already - for building my orders, including fruit / vegetables (from boxes). They currently have humans filter the veggies and fruit prior to box setup, but a friend is working on the models to eliminate even that.
Their robots do movement using sliding scale in 3D spaces (think poles that are left right, up and down, and the "picker" being able to glide and move. They currently have a ceiling slider that goes down and suctions things into a pneumatic tube to then end up in my grocery bag. IMHO it works pretty well - especially considering that delivery is ~$8 for me.
Ultimately we're going to end up with several different types of robots, and not with a human centric vision. The question is if bipedal is a long term dead-end, and merely a short term method to fit into the world we currently have designed.
There's a bunch of options for this task, but combining the three wheel stair-climbing dolly with the self-balancing hoverboard/segway seems like the easiest.
you don't need legs to climb stairs, you can have a rotating mechanism with different rows of wheels that have good enough grip, maybe an extruding stick to lift the whole robot up and the wheels move forward... would take a lot fewer joints than pair of legs probably.
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Why do we have the assumption that industrial robots need to have legs? The largest grocery store chain uses picker robots already - for building my orders, including fruit / vegetables (from boxes). They currently have humans filter the veggies and fruit prior to box setup, but a friend is working on the models to eliminate even that.
Their robots do movement using sliding scale in 3D spaces (think poles that are left right, up and down, and the "picker" being able to glide and move. They currently have a ceiling slider that goes down and suctions things into a pneumatic tube to then end up in my grocery bag. IMHO it works pretty well - especially considering that delivery is ~$8 for me.
Ultimately we're going to end up with several different types of robots, and not with a human centric vision. The question is if bipedal is a long term dead-end, and merely a short term method to fit into the world we currently have designed.
It would be nice to have a thing that can carry a bucket of paint up a flight of stairs
There's a bunch of options for this task, but combining the three wheel stair-climbing dolly with the self-balancing hoverboard/segway seems like the easiest.
you don't need legs to climb stairs, you can have a rotating mechanism with different rows of wheels that have good enough grip, maybe an extruding stick to lift the whole robot up and the wheels move forward... would take a lot fewer joints than pair of legs probably.
If this was awesome, we would have it on wheelchairs. We very rarely do. Stairs are built for legs.