3 DOF per leg, so it needs 12 motors and controllers. Getting that under $1000 is nice.
Here's the US$18 motor: [1] Those things are getting really cheap. He did have to rewind it, though, for more turns with thinner wire. The manufacturer mentions that you can order with "custom Kv", which means you might be able to get a different winding from the factory if you order a reasonable quantity. Especially if you tell them that makes them "robot motors".
Motor overheating might be a problem. The dog, just standing, has its motors stalled under load, converting power to heat. Drones don't do that. Temperature feedback would help if this thing has to operate for extended periods. Remember yesterday's article on humanoid robots and their cooling problems.
The motor controller is nice too, and cheap at $49. Needed fixes to the firmware, but that's not surprising at the price. High performance motor controllers used to cost about $1000.
Repurposed drone technology has done wonders for legged robots. We're not quite at the point where limb drive hardware is off the shelf, but it's way better than it used to be.
Not my field so I'm likely using the wrong name for the concept, anyway, don't stepping (bistable) brakes exist? I mean, one pulse to one pin engages and one pulse to another pin disengages, just like step relays, with the current consumption being zero when it's not operated so that the robot can be kept indefinitely in resting position without wasting energy to keep motors stalled.
Stepping motors are not good at stationary power consumption. They use power even with no load on them.
Brakes for robot joints are common in industrial robots. They're usually part of the emergency stop system. If power fails, the controller crashes, or someone pushes the emergency stop button, spring-driven brakes lock all major joints to stop all motion.[1]
That might be useful in a quadruped, which can park without active balance.
I like the wide layout of the site but just on a readability front on a widescreen monitor after the opening more narrow paragraphs it changes to full width text layout and those could benefit from a `columns: 2` in CSS to split them since reading long width paragraphs is a bit difficult.
The jumps are pretty impressive, this thing has some power. I'd be very curious how fast you could get this dog with some reinforcement learning for a proper transverse gallop gait - and if it converges towards a gallop naturally, or if it discovers some other fast gait patterns during learning.
Depending on the max speed of the motors/legs, giving it longer foot pads might be necessary for a good gallop. Intuitively, it looks a bit... "low gear" in the videos.
I wonder how accurate a virtual model could be made of this, which could be iterated on millions of times faster.
My first project as a research assistant in AI was doing evolutionary algorithms on Khepera robots, which had a virtual Java implementation. We were able to evolve some pretty cool behaviors, although I don't know what would have happened if we had uploaded them into a physical Khepera robot.
Awesome video. It's interesting, informative, and entertaining.
Founders I talk to that are doing hardware, broadly speaking, say it's a competitive advantage as it's not as crowded. Content like Aaed's will hopefully nudge more people into it.
People are all discussing the technical aspects of the device, which is great and all, but forgetting the one aspect I am in awe of: how googly eyes once again make everything 300% better.
Qugv looks cool and futuristic and has that wow factor, great in expos and milking investors’ money, but practically speaking? They are useless, they have the bad mobility of UGV (compared to UAV), and the bad endurance of UAV (compared to UGV), so they are the mix of worst of both worlds. There’s also other technical issues but yeah, only good for marketing, no matter how they try to push them in defense or whatever, they never materialize.
All I can think of is slippage and the lack of precision though I know I’m wrong because he spends a significant part of a previous video explaining why it isn’t an issue.
As it so happens 'cara' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cara#Irish is the Irish [Gaelic] word for 'friend' (probably related to words like Italian 'caro' etc.) so CARA is not a bad name for a robot dog!
Very nice project. If you like this, the Pupper quadruped robot project by Stanford University is also interesting, with RL training pipeline as well and well-documented open source instructions for 3d printing etc. https://pupper-v3-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gui...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] threadHere's the US$18 motor: [1] Those things are getting really cheap. He did have to rewind it, though, for more turns with thinner wire. The manufacturer mentions that you can order with "custom Kv", which means you might be able to get a different winding from the factory if you order a reasonable quantity. Especially if you tell them that makes them "robot motors".
Motor overheating might be a problem. The dog, just standing, has its motors stalled under load, converting power to heat. Drones don't do that. Temperature feedback would help if this thing has to operate for extended periods. Remember yesterday's article on humanoid robots and their cooling problems.
The motor controller is nice too, and cheap at $49. Needed fixes to the firmware, but that's not surprising at the price. High performance motor controllers used to cost about $1000.
Repurposed drone technology has done wonders for legged robots. We're not quite at the point where limb drive hardware is off the shelf, but it's way better than it used to be.
[1] https://www.xntyi.com/tyi-5008-kv335/kv400-high-speed-brushl...
Brakes for robot joints are common in industrial robots. They're usually part of the emergency stop system. If power fails, the controller crashes, or someone pushes the emergency stop button, spring-driven brakes lock all major joints to stop all motion.[1] That might be useful in a quadruped, which can park without active balance.
[1] https://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/28812-c...
Depending on the max speed of the motors/legs, giving it longer foot pads might be necessary for a good gallop. Intuitively, it looks a bit... "low gear" in the videos.
My first project as a research assistant in AI was doing evolutionary algorithms on Khepera robots, which had a virtual Java implementation. We were able to evolve some pretty cool behaviors, although I don't know what would have happened if we had uploaded them into a physical Khepera robot.
This is spectacular as a reference, which youtube isn't
Founders I talk to that are doing hardware, broadly speaking, say it's a competitive advantage as it's not as crowded. Content like Aaed's will hopefully nudge more people into it.
And, if you can scale that up, then why even mention it? It's not relevant.