Dennis Hong, director of RoMeLa at Virginia Tech, presents TEDxNASA on mobile robots, their design principles, and how his lab develops ideas.
Hong introduces STriDER, a three-legged robot that moves by tipping its body and swinging a leg to catch itself, using principles of passive dynamic walking. A later design uses one motor to coordinate its motion, reducing the weight of the earlier prototype. IMPASS combines wheels and adjustable spokes, switching between touch-based responses and sensor-guided planning to handle soft ground and obstacles taller than the robot.
CLIMBeR uses three legs and a cable winch to find stable footholds on cliffs, with possible search-and-rescue use. MARS adapts its gait to terrain such as sand, where moisture and grain size affect how deeply its feet sink. Hong also describes an amoeba-like robot, a snake robot with an intuitive fiber-optic control interface, and RAPHaEL, a compliant air-powered hand whose first prototype cost $200.
Hong traces DARwIn from an early sensor-free feasibility model to a self-contained robot with onboard computing, cameras, motion sensors, foot force sensors, and batteries. The robot searches for a ball and plays soccer autonomously. Hong connects the work to RoboCup's goal of having humanoid robots compete against human World Cup champions by 2050, and shows later robots performing in soccer, conducting an orchestra, and demonstrating martial arts movements.
Hong says he records late-night mechanism ideas in a bedside notebook, then develops promising sketches into a searchable idea database and matches them to research funding opportunities. At RoMeLa, brainstorming sessions begin with a rule against criticizing ideas, which helps students share unusual possibilities. He argues that creativity needs education in subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, along with sustained work and enjoyment.
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Dr. Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech presents the DARwIn-OP humanoid robot, its development and research goals, alongside collaborators at Purdue, the University of Pennsylvania, and ROBOTIS.
Dennis Hong, robotics professor and founding director at Virginia Tech, explains why humanoid robots suit human environments and how his lab developed soccer-playing robots and firefighting prototypes.
Michael Chang, a PhD researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, presents his work at the GRASP Lab Spring 2023 SFI on neural abstractions for modeling and controlling systems, and discusses future human-computer interfaces at DeepMind.
Karen Liu, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, discusses physics-based human motion simulation and its use in robotics at an MIT Robotics talk.
A ROBOTIS presenter discusses a Darwin humanoid robot that plays Dance Dance Revolution and the vision-processing and motion constraints behind the demonstration.
Alex, role and affiliation unknown, presents the Darwin Drives project with King at an ICRA 2012 challenge; they show a humanoid robot operating an iRobot Create and discuss possible uses for humanoid-driven vehicles.
