Re: Bipedal Locomotive Vehicle

mvillanu_at_gmail.com
Date: 12/07/04 

To: sci-military-moderated@moderators.isc.org
Date: 7 Dec 2004 12:21:36 -0800

sanman wrote:
> Here's a new bipedal personal transport concept vehicle made by
> Toyota:
>
> http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/04/1203_1d.html
>
> I kinda like the look of it. It may look humble right now, but I see
> in it the beginnings of many Japanese animated sci-fi stories.
>
> What they really need to add next are mechanical arms, for
maintaining
> balance.
>
> If nothing else, it could make for an excellent new spinoff of Robot
> Wars on Comedy Channel.
>
> But ultimately, something like this could evolve into a new type of
> man-agile combat vehicle.

I wouldn't bet on it. At least not anytime soon.

Think of this thing as a sedan. A sedan has very specific road
conditions in order for its operational lifetime to be practical. It
needs smooth flat surfaces with little irregularity. It's meant to
cruise around at manageable speeds through a very controlled
environment (properly laid-out roads).

You wouldn't take a sedan and drive it in off-road conditions. You
wouldn't have it consistently pull or carry heavy loads either. And
finally you wouldn't be making screeching stops and sudden hairpin
turns with a sedan as well. For conditions like this, you need a
Landcruiser or a HMMV, or any other vehicle design with robustness in
mind.

The design changes from sedan to off-road vehicle aren't that hard.
We've done it for almost a hundred years.

But for a bipedal vehicle, with its actuators, energy source, and more
importantly control loops, the design challenges from Sedan (link you
showed us) to Off-Road and Combat capable (Japanese Anime power suits)
are quite difficult.

A combat power suit will need to carry heavy loads (armor and weapons)
yet have some degree of agility. This means the actuators need to be
powerful yet high bandwidth...but usually you can only have or the
other thanks to current technology and the laws of physics. Electrical
actuators are fast but lack power. Hydraulic actuators are powerful
but are slow. Not to mention the more powerful they are the bigger
they become, which increases weight, which means bigger actuators,
which increases weight etc...

Also, the energy source will need to output some sort of power for the
actuators. Powerful actuators need lots of...power. This power source
will need to deliver that yet still be compact and lightweight enough
for the vehicle to carry it.

Finally there's the heart of the issue. The control loops for the
"sedan", while very admirable and show a great degree of ingenuity on
the part of the engineers who designed them, are still not robust
enough. Can you imagine Honda's Asimo, Sony's Quiro, or this Toyota
Bipedal transport running around on uneven ground with irregular
consistency? To be combat capable, the control loops have to take into
account rubble, slippery surfaces, uneven surfaces, unstable surfaces,
etc...

All of which a human can navigate through very easily. But from a
control system design perspective it's very hard. It will require a
lot of effort even without actuator and power source technology holding
it back. Hence a long time before we can have something like that, if
ever.

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