Hitachi EMIEW2 Uses Roller Skates
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 21 of June , 2010 at 2:08 am
There are lots of reasons why heavy robots tend to use wheels instead of legs, but there may be just as many reasons why legs are more versatile and adaptable than wheels. We’ve seen a couple effective implementations of wheels made up of lots of little legs, but Hitachi’s EMIEW2 humanoid robot just uses wheels on its legs instead of feet. This approach gives the robot efficiency and stability while moving, along with the potential for it to make its way over obstacles (sort of):
I’m not entirely sure who the heck has carpet like that, and to be honest, EMIEW2′s adaptive suspension doesn’t look like it’s getting that much of a workout. Also, it’s unclear as to whether the robot can actually balance itself on one wheel, which would be necessary for it to “step” over an obstacle larger than its wheels are capable of negotiating, which is what I found to be potentially cool about this design in the first place. Still, it is pretty darn cute, and it can do precision speech recognition and sound localization, which is handy.
As with most Asian humanoid robots with fancy plastic shells, Hitachi suggests many ways in which EMIEW2 might be commercially useful (the obligatory guide/guard duties), but doesn’t offer any sort of cohesive commercial details.
VIA [ WWWery ] and [ Physorg ]
Comments (4)
Category: Androids
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