Hobby Humanoid Hikes Like a Human

Famous Japanese robot hobbyist Dr. Guero has posted a new video showing an advanced walking gait that looks remarkably humanlike.  Not only does it look great, but it’s clearly effective too: the robot covers ground quickly, and does it all using much smaller feet than the standard robot klonkers.

In the video comments, Dr. Guero points out that while the typical robot walk involves lowering the hips and keeping the knees bent, this one extends the knees just like a human, and obtains a more natural gait.

Of course there are good reasons why most robots don’t walk this way — upright bipedal walking is hard.  But Dr. Guero has done it; the walk here compares quite favorably to any multimillion-dollar humanoid robot.  He also notes that this gait uses less energy than the typical robot walk.

This robot stands 380 mm tall, masses 1.425 kg, and uses 16 Kondo KRS-2552HV servos, with a custom gyro board for dynamic balancing.  Its strides can vary based on need, but a typical stride length is 100 mm, at a rate of 450 ms per step.  (That works out to about 0.22 meters/sec, or 0.6 body-lengths per second, compared to 0.8 body-lengths per second for a human — pretty close!)

Dr. Guero’s new robot certainly isn’t the only attempt at humanlike walking (see here for another recent example), but it’s certainly the best I’ve seen.  It’s a great example of how the hobby robotics community can make real contributions to the advancement of robot technology.

[Via Robots-Dreams and AI & Robot]