Gadgetory

everyone we were here at CES 2017 and I am bi I'm in front of a giant mech robot so this is a mech racing robot I'm joined by Jonathan working on the prosthesis robot Jonathan how's it going pretty good pretty exciting here yes so we're gonna be talking about this thing it's huge before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by cyber power and there's cyber XL gaming PC with an invertible motherboard tray layout hit the link in the description below for more information so Jonathan starting straight off with this can you give me a top-level overview so we understand what we're talking about yeah so this is a purpose-built off-road racing machine it weighs about 8,000 pounds it has a 200 horsepower lithium-ion electric power plant and it's a hundred percent human controlled it has no self-awareness no sensors in its joints it's truly a sports machine and it requires an athlete to operate it'll be a very challenging machine to operate it requires an athlete does the physical fitness of the pilot actually matter yeah absolutely I mean it's gonna be more about coordination as the engineer my job was to make it stable and learn about so the input forces will be relatively low but you'll be strapped in facedown in the harness flailing your arms and legs controlling all the legs of the machine with your own body that's four legs right yeah four legs the outside legs are controlled by your arms and the inside legs are controlled by your legs so it has a kind of a a gate of a gorilla what's what functions can this do I guess obviously walking can it accelerate sprinting jumping yeah it is it's intended to be a running racing machine so it's got a meter of hydraulically actuated leg travel and then another half a meter of suspension travel it's outfitted with custom SPECT like off-road racing shocks so the computer simulations were based on drop test of a meter the computer simulations also indicate that it will be able to leap up to half a meter off the ground from a standstill which would be amazed and then it's got a four and a half meters stride so if you that if you're doing that every half second like that's 30 kilometers an hour so 8,000 pounds and it can jump about half a meter you're saying yeah that sounds like a lot of force it's a tremendous amount of course we're running 3,000 psi on the hydraulics and when you put it all together there's about 14,000 pounds of thrust making this thing jump what's what's the current status we're getting this actually in some kind of race even if it's just like a times trial that's a great question because it is the only one of its kind in the world so time trial is going to be the first format we we have the control system designed and built on a prototype leg back at the lab in Vancouver and this powerplant and like sort of structural architecture of this is all working we had to position it to move it here on the trailer so we're gonna bring it back to Vancouver in February after hitting SolidWorks world in LA and put the interface in and probably test it in the next six weeks there should be some videos coming out of it running around the fields and the valleys this is all flat terrain for now I guess definitely flat terrain for starting these bumper bars actually deploy almost right down to the ground so they allow the pilot to train without falling over and they've got big shocks on them so and they also will write the machine if it does end up face-first at some point but it's capable of hills stairs rocks whatever you name it and how about for the the feet which are massive obviously anything special going on there the feet were actually one of the most challenging parts of the machine because there's so many demands on a foot I mean the human foot is ultra complex compared to just our simple limbs the they're gonna have they don't have them on now but they're gonna have your polyurethane pads so part of the development process will be to engineer the right kind of compliance and the pads will be wrapping like off-road racing tires will take dune buggie tires or atv tires and and wrap them around so I'll have these big knobby toe pads you can swap them out for like road slick tires and then there's all the degrees of freedom that the toes articulates so that if you hit they hit on even ground they don't just warp there's a little bit of suspension compliance in the ankles so its feet are one of the greatest challenges pretty cool anywhere that folks can go to learn more or follow your progress Twitter Khan's websites yeah absolutely we've got a Twitter and Instagram handle of racing underscore MEK and pure in robotics comm is the website that we'll be posting updates on if you're in robotics is the joint venture between me and my team and fury on our top sponsor here so that's where the the mech Racing League will be grown awesome so if you want to learn more you hit the links in the description below or go to those locations thank you for joining me Jonathan pleasure and we'll see you all next time you