Has anyone seen this yet?

"Shawn B."

I saw it here

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-10-coolest-robots

yesterday, and yes, I found it the most impressive one, especially when the
guy kicks it and it recovers without falling.

They should've put a head on it, it's too weird to watch it moving without a
head, kinda of scary :-)

Padu

    --Wow, great site! I think it should be #1 just because it works in
the real world. The first time I saw this thing it looked damned weird, but
with the musical accompaniment it's pretty kewl, heh.


--
        "Steamboat Ed" Haas         :  Concave, convex, con      
        Hacking the Trailing Edge!  :  carne: all is Zen..
                          www.nmpproducts.com
                   ---Decks a-wash in a sea of words---

Yup,

It is real.

The thing only works for a few minutes at a time, and the throttle has to be
wide open all those minutes...

Mike

"blueeyedpop"

And that is in my opinion the biggest challenge for mobile robotics...
autonomy. Electrical power is in my opinion not appropriate for mobile
robotics, and gasoline is too messy and noisy.
I wonder if one day nuclear energy will be as safe and as known to be put
into a device the size of a AAA battery that could give energy for a robot
to move centuries non-stop. (ok, it's early in the morning, I'm still
dreamming)

Cheers

Padu

Well, that's sort of the dream of cold fusion. While chemical reactions,
like combustion or batteries, is pretty efficient, atomic fusion or decay
should be more so.

What I'd like to see is a practical conversion from nuclear "radiation" to
electricity. We'd dig up all the discarded waste from power plants and pack
it into lead lined batteries packs. Sure, we'd also have to make a
container that couldn't be broken, but something having a half like
measured in hundreds or thousands of years, seems like a wasted power
source.

It's called an "IsoMiTe"--NASA has been using them since the '60s.


If the half life is that long the amount of energy that can be derived in a
given time is quite small.

Fuel cells are likely to be far more satisfactory for most robotic uses.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

But these are thermonic, which some people would say is not terribly
efficient. However, they do seem to have suited V'ger quite well. In a
few centuries, that blasted thing will come back to kill us all.

-- Gordon

Mainly due to limited temperature differential.  Internal combustion engines
are not terribly efficient either but they are nonetheless "practical".
The Russians used nuclear thermionic cells all over the place at one time
and there are people running around with nuclear powered pacemakers, so
it's certainly a "practical" technology.


--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

But the half life can be reduced.  There is an article in
the current (Mar 18th) issue of The Economist about
an experimental reactor in Japan that burns nuclear
waste by shooting high energy protons at it.  The
protons knock loose neutrons, which may cause
fission (releasing more neutrons) or be absorbed by
other nuclei.  In most cases, the resulting nuclei have
much shorter half-life than the original material, which
means the energy is released as heat over decades
instead of millennium.  Even after subtracting the
power needed to run the proton accelerator, they
come out ahead.

It is just a research project.  But I think that it is quite
possible that future generations will look at the gunk
we are storing in Yucca Mountain as a resource
rather than waste.


Yes, I don't expect to see any nuclear robots.

The premise in the post to which I was responding was that the half life was
hundreds of thousands of years.  My point was that there is a relationship
between half-life and energy production--the longer the half-life the lower
the rate of energy production.


That is quite likely.


On the contrary, there are nuclear robots in existence now.  See, for
example, Voyager.  Depends on the application.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

what frequency/wave length is radiation from spent
fuel rods?  

build an antenna to catch it.

Rich

I'm pretty sure it is in the form of particles and not waves, and yes, I
know that there are formula to represent virtually anything as either, but
I think it is more than that.

Right now, we are sort of primitive. We can only harness two types of
energy, heat and electronic force. We harness magnetism only in so much as
it creates movement of electrons. There are so many forms of energy for
which we may have ways of measuring them, but thus for can not harness
them.

If a device like a Geiger counter could be constructed so that particle
impact, somehow, created sufficient electronic force, then it would be
possible to wrap atomic waste in such a device and have a virtually
perpetual energy source.

I've been researching technology, and the "WE" in the above
statement refers to society.  Mass marketed technology.  "they"
create a demand for the supply they've manufactured.

There is more information out there than "WE" know.  Individuals
have developed technology that hasn't been marketed.  It isn't
marketed because it threatens or or will destroy the current market
and society.

Rich

Don't be a conspiracy theory nut. It would have to be a HUGE secret. Who
would keep this secret? How could they keep it?

The same way they kept my flatulence-powered AM radio from ever seeing
the light of day.

I could have been rich, RICH, I tell you!


--
(Replies: cleanse my address of the Mark of the Beast!)

Teleoperate a roving mobile robot from the web:
http://www.swampgas.com/robotics/rover.html

Coauthor with Dennis Clark of "Building Robot Drive Trains".
Buy several copies today!

Maybe you should have made more of a stink about it. You know what they
say: The louder you are, the more they notice you.

-- Gordon

You should try to market it again. They probably just thought that sound was
static.

You're marketing it all wrong.  Howard Stern would have you on in a
second.  There's your big chance.  Grab the brass ring...or finger in
your case and pull.

It isn't a conspiracy.  It's called engineering of society.


How does a secret gain in size?

You drive a vehicle that has a gasoline powered
reciprocating engine.  Do you know how long "we"
have had technology superior to this machine?  It
lasted the lifetime of the inventor, then died with him.

Do you know that "we" almost had a DC electricity
distribution system?  The idea was driven by the
industry leaders at the time.

Do you know that GE made the first refrigerator/freezers
as inefficient as possible, to increase sales of electricity?

Do you think that duracell, energizer would allow a "battery"
that lasted 10X as long as their products to be marketed?

Do you think that the oil/automotive manufacturing/repair
industry would allow a maintenance free, 10X more efficient
engine to be marketed?

New inventions are accepted by the established industry
only if they increase the demand for the products that are
currently being manufactured.

Machines that have a long lifetime (relative to current lifespans
of current machines) are unacceptable.  If you build an umbrella
that lasts for 50 years, each person has to buy only one every
50 years.  The umbrella company goes out of business.

If umbrellas are manufactured to break in a year, you can sell
one per year per person.  The umbrella company thrives.

light bulbs, autos, shoes, clothing, paint, roads, all manufactured
to break, so you have to go get a new one.

is it a "huge" secret?  Nope.  Just something that most people don't
think about.

When we were hunter/gatherers, we worked as a tribe for about
4 hours a day to get our food.  That leaves about 8 hours a day
for recreation, art, thought, invention.

Now we work 8 hours a day to get our food.  What happened to
our free time?  What does it get spent on?

The products that we MUST HAVE.  Why must we have them?
because "they" tell us we must have them.

The individuals who have invented machines that threaten
the design of the society have been labeled "crackpots", crazy,
or just plain silly.  We believe they are "crackpots" and that
the inventions they created are impossible, because that is what
we are told.


Whoever benefits most.  The people who have us working 8
hours a day, who have us spending all of our time on their
products.


Mass media.  Newspapers, television, books, "gaps" between
"generations" of people.

How do you keep a secret?  You either don't ever tell anyone about
it, or lie.  If you don't tell anyone about it, it would be good to
tell other
dramatic stories to keep people thinking about something else.  Or
invent engaging activities to keep people busy enough that they don't
have time to question the lies.


Rich