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Phoenix666 writes:

Based on every horror/sci-fi movie I've ever seen, squishing an actual fleshy human brain into a robot would make it unstoppable. And probably evil. Sooner or later, I'm sure someone is going try it for real. Until they do, what's almost as good is letting a robot borrow an actual fleshy human brain to help it balance and complete tasks requiring sensing and dexterity. It's like teleoperation, except the user's brain and body are controlling the robot directly, from inside a haptic suit.

HERMES is a disaster response robot from MIT based on the Cheetah Robot, developed by Professor Sangbae Kim and his group at the MIT Biomimetic Robotics Lab. Basically, imagine that Cheetah could stand on two legs and use its front legs like arms, and you've got HERMES: a 12-degrees-of-freedom 25-kilogram biped with those ultra powerful, custom high-torque-density electric actuators that allow Cheetah to sprint and jump. HERMES is about 90 percent of the size of an average human, which is big enough to let it naturally interact with human environments.

The other half of MIT's system, and what makes it so interesting, is the control interface. It's got cameras in the head to provide an immersive view for a human teleoperator, which is not uncommon, and the robot's arms and grippers are controlled directly, using a master-slave Waldo-like system. We've seen this sort of thing before. What's brand new, though, is the Balance Feedback Interface (BFI), which is a sort of force-feedback belt that provides physical force to the human based on ground reaction forces on the robot's feet (the center of pressure, to be precise), and also uses the movement of the human to balance the robot

One step closer...

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