Enschede (NL). With our partners in the SYMBITRON project at the University of Twente we had the opportunity to test the LOPES exoskeleton and were trying to hop on a virtual spring.
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Humanoid speed records
Comparing robots to each other is not an easy task given all the different design and control concepts. Furthermore a speed record, in my humble opinion, accounts more for human showmanship than for a scientific insight. Nevertheless, what robots actually run and at what speeds make frequently good lab discussions, and therefore I present a small ranking of humanoid robots and their reported speeds. Only human-size robots (based on my rather subjective judgement) are considered, the list will be updated. Continue reading
On the road I – TU Delft
Delft (NL). Visiting our Symbitron project partners in Delft we had the opportunity to play a bit with TULIP, a bipedal robot I have always been curious about. In Delft I joined my first Dynamic Walking Meeting and TULIP has been around back then.
It is a well engineered robot, suitable for dynamic tasks though maybe a bit underpowered. At an impressive weight of only 20kg at his height there is still a lot to do. Joost (left in the picture) is working on getting TULIP to walk in a limit cycle.
Postdocs…
…are a curious breed – graduated and passing a heavy selection process but far from having a permanent position or even a chance of obtaining one. Science mentioned some of the common post-doc struggles in its recent article “The stressed-out postdoc“
Statistics
An important tool in science which, if not used with caution, can lead to quite surprising results. Always check your correlation!
Dynamic Walking Impressions
A video from the robot demonstration at Dynamic Walking. See me in the Locomat (0:43).
Will you be a PI
Science magazine provides the PI-predictor. I don’t know about it’s accuracy, but its an interesting gadget.
Paper taking off
The last published paper “Impulsive ankle push-off powers leg swing in human walking.” has generated some great feedback at the 2014 Dynamic Walking conference in Zurich. The current metrics also suggest, that our article has hit a nerve. I hope we can continue on that soon!
Paul Newman “Where are the robots?”
An entertaining talk about the state of the arts in robotics. I have to correct though – robotics is not just text files, mechanics is important for particular tasks.
Coverage II
The press release made it to India, taken up by Press Trust of India (PTI) and published by “The Free Press Journal” from Mumbai, though quite exaggerating. The Indian “Business Standard” and “TruthDive“covered the story, too. The IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society shared the story on Facebook and the Chinese “TransMed” said something about it. It can be found on the UK-based Aso-robotics blog, RadioAllen in Chile, Russian “Science in the 21st century’“, and Croatian “Dalje.com” and on “Robotics Tomorrow“.