Marc Raibert: belief

Transcript context

…So at the leg lab, I believe most of the robots didn’t have knees. How do you figure out what is the right number of actuators? What are the joints to have? What do you need to have? We humans have knees and all kinds of interesting stuff on the feet. The toe is an important part, I guess, for humans, or maybe it’s not. I injured my toe recently and it made running very unpleasant. So that seems to be important. So how do you figure out for efficiency, for function, for aesthetics, how many joints to have, how many actuaries to have? Well, it’s always a balance between wanting to get where you really want to get and what’s practical to do based on your resources or what you know and all that. So I mean, the whole idea of the pogo stick was to do a simplification. Obviously, it didn’t look like a human. I think a technical scientist could appreciate that we were capturing some of the things that are important in human locomotion without it looking like it, without having a knee, an ankle. I’ll tell you the first sketch that Ben Brown made when we were talking about building this thing, was a very complicated thing with zillions of springs, lots of joints. It looked much more like a kangaroo or an ostrich or something like that. Things we were paying a lot of attention to at the time. So my job was to say, okay, well let’s do something simpler to get started and maybe we’ll get there at some point. I just love the idea that you two were studying kangaroos and ostriches.…

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