Gadgetory

hi so when you think of walking robots the first thing that you probably picture is something from Boston Dynamics those robots that do backflips and can run really fast well I'm here at the amber lab at Caltech in California where they're building and designing a different type of walking robot the idea is if you can teach them to run walk and jump just like us you can translate that into something that's really useful for humans like prosthetics and exoskeletons so I'm gonna go inside take a look at the lab and have a play with some of the robots how do you teach a robot to walk like a human is it a process obviously have a lot of falling down trial and error there's certainly a lot of trial and error involved but we try to actually minimize that and and so the the word teach is interesting because we don't actually do learning on the robots themselves so the idea is we're more teaching ourselves we try to understand the basic mathematical principles of locomotion right we go to the physics we go to the dynamics and we try to sort of prove theorems and have this mathematical representation of locomotion and once you have that you can distill that into algorithms that ultimately go on the robot so the end goal of understanding the locomotion is to help humans that's right that's right and that's a big part of it so by having this approach where we try to take this sort of fundamental mathematical principled viewpoint on robotic walking is what we can take that knowledge and translate it to and and again the idea is every time we achieve a behavior let's say walking or running we'd like to put that on a prosthetic device have a person walk or run with it and ultimately an exoskeleton device for example for a paraplegic somebody that can't walk we would like to have them get up and walk with the same kind of algorithms that we're using on our walking robots so that's the ultimate process that we're shooting for before the robots walk they have to hop this is a one dimensional robot hopping up and down on a track it's a collaboration between Caltech and Disney research with the final robot designed to live inside a ball and bounce around Amba is a two-dimensional robot used to study locomotion it can go backwards forwards and up or down we also designed this controller for perturbation including peaking or pushing push recovery per se so that sounds scary push recovery so if I literally go in and push it unless you are really aggressive but I doubt it you can I challenge you to where should I try and push it okay so the Safety's place will be around the hip in this line so just this part so using the bar I should drive push it back yeah I got a strong touch it feels really cool this feels really calm but I'm gonna try and [Laughter] besides shoving the robot I also try it also cruel I can't believe I'm gonna do this I'm sorry robot oh it's had a little stumble yeah but it's fine I got me a little nervous but really and if that's not enough I push it with a stick what if the robot uprising happens and the robots watch this and they think that I'm cruel I'm not cruel no you're trying to make me better yeah I'm making you better okay you're learning their limit here we go it's a comet that's amazing so cool sorry again why did we do why do we try and trip a robot because we are designing walking controllers you have very particular scenario in mind but in reality when you put a robot outside there are so many things can happen so you want to design a controller and considering it its robustness against some type of accident so you can go outside in a walk outside the overall aim is not to try and mirror how humans walk but achieve what's called human inspired control so they can translate robotic walking to prosthetics like this one called an Pro unfortunately I can't try it on myself because I haven't been trained but Rachel gives me a quick overview of what it feels like to wear so how does it actually feel to give over control to this and walk oh yeah it took an adjustment to feel to learn to balance with it and also you have to fully trust the robot to put all of my weight on it because there's obviously times that I don't have my foot on the ground and I'm only standing on the prosthesis so how heavy is it so it's slightly more than the weight of a human leg and so it's around 11 or 12 pounds but it feels heavier because we still have the weight of our own leg it's all powered through this lipo battery so you just hold onto it on the back man yeah so I just put it in my pocket and it can last for about 3 to 4 hours of continuous walking how fast do you think that you could go with it is there a limit or is it really just up to you it's just up to me but the pace I'm walking here that's about the normal pace that I walk when I'm with it right so you don't really want to be doing sprints and stuff with this I know it's yeah it's just made to do walking on flat ground for right now and the actual mechanism of the foot so it looks like it's just walking fairly flat but if you're walking up hills or stairs how does it cope with that that's like something for a future work is to design the motion to specifically be for walking up a slope or down a slope but it's robust enough to slopes that I can still walk with it and so obviously in the lab it's a very controlled environment surfaces are flat there's no kind of weather incidents but how do you test for things that are edge cases like icy slippery surfaces sand that's right and you're really pointing to exactly one of the big problems is in a lab we know the surface is hard we know exactly how to walk on that but if you take and put that robot on ice or sand it's gonna fall it's gonna fall hard you know I would say I joke with people and they're worried that sort of robots are gonna take over the world and you know terminators coming I said just run on to some sandy slope it's fall on its face and you're gonna be totally safe because we haven't really solved that problem yet so but we've made gains and that's really what we're working towards right now meet Cassie made by agility robotics it's a robot that moves in three dimensions and all the mass from its motors is up top so it's carbon-fiber legs have a full range of motion so before we actually put anything on the robot what we do is simulate it so we actually will design our walking trajectories through the same optimization problem or suit through the same type of methods that we do with the amber robot and the prosthetic that you saw earlier so we're using a lot of the same concepts here when we're designing the controllers so this is the walking controller that you're gonna see on the actual robot being simulated unlike the other robots in the lab Cassie is designed to go out in the real world it's semi autonomous so Jake is using a controller to give it nudges in certain directions but isn't telling it where to put its feet cassie is doing an amazing job walking on terrain that's got a lot of slopes taking twigs with ease it's fantastic and you've seen people that have just literally stopped in their tracks watching reacting there are kids in prams that are wide-eyed and seeing this amazing feat for what it is Cathy literally stops traffic but the real test for Cassie is getting out on to tricky terrain like dirt and grass or in this case briefs amazing that's really I was like shocked it was dance I was a good way to close it off she did as hopeful as well as I could have yeah just the whole purpose of it so fantastic and to make it to here it's like yeah you know and hey on the exam so well that was an amazing experience at the amber lab I got to interact with robots trip them over and perform disturbance testing and it's really fascinating to see how this is gonna translate to eventually helping humans I can't wait to see what happens next thank you so much for watching the show make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe and I'll see you next time but okay I'm into it all right what's my terrible aim anywhere I'm sorry but this is all for research right