Transportation devices based on mechanical feet?

How could this be used:

Transportation device based on mechanical feet, that can carry 50 kilos of hiker's camping gear over difficult terrain. Clearly that can not work without fairly complicated software that regulates force on every electric actuator / motor. It needs about 6 axis for each feet. 2 feet would need 12 axis + possibly 2 actuators that move the center of mass on top of the feet. The forces need to be regulated maybe 10, maybe 30, maybe 100 times per second. Let's say it's about 100. If every axis can have it's force expressed with one byte, one "signed char", a number from -127 to +127, fed to the digital-to-analog converters, then there needs to be about one kilobyte per second datastream to keep the transportation device walking.

Mechanical engineers do not have a need to have any idea about how software engineers can make the on-board computer to compute that datastream based on some 3D scanning of terrain few meters ahead and information about axis angles.

Unlike self-driving cars or drones, this technology does not have to be reliable. It does not necessarily matter much if the transportation device stumbles once per kilometer of walking, as long as someone is there to help it up. One person can lead a caravan of 10 walkers carrying 500 kilos of stuff. The 3d scanning, possibly based on stereoscopic computations with data from 2 "cell phone cameras", can be low quality; as low as someone gets with eyes when walking in a dark forest in moonlight.

Other technology in it is nothing special: Lithium-ion batteries used in drones, electric motors used in drones, doors or boats, computer with a 4 core ARM processor with at most gigabyte of ram, some small Linux, freeBSD or openBSD, remote control based on wlan, bluetooth or near-infrared.

Most of this could be said also about drones that fly like birds by flapping wings ( ornitophter ), but it is unclear whether such drones would give any efficiency advantage compared to helicopter drones.

Submitted November 06, 2017 at 08:27PM by herkato5 http://ift.tt/2AmfplE via TikTokTikk