Anybots' Dextor is the world's first dynamically balanced walking robot, meaning it balances just like a human (unlike the famous Honda's Asimo robot). Paul Graham explains:
There are of course biped robots that walk. The Honda Asimo is the best known. But the Asimo doesn't balance dynamically. Its walk is preprogrammed; if you had it walk twice across the same space, it would put its feet down in exactly the same place the second time. And of course the floor has to be hard and flat.
Dynamically balancing—the way we walk—is much harder. It looks fairly smooth when we do it, but it's really a controlled fall. At any given moment you have to think (or at least, your body does) about which direction you're falling, and put your foot down in exactly the right place to push you in the direction you want to go. Practice makes it seem easy to us, but it's a very hard problem to solve.
Links: YouTube clip | Anybots Website - via robots.net
Comments (2)
The blurb about the Asimo is simply false (i dont work for Honda or whatever).
The current ASIMO does in fact use ZMP (aka dynamic) - based balancing. And if you wanna see a REALLY good humanoid robot, (that can in fact stand up if completely pushed over) check out the now-cancelled Sony SDR-4X aka the QRIO.
It take at five matching words to confirm that it is the correct word. By putting in an incorrect word, it only requires the system to check the word one extra time to confirm it.