GE’s bringing good things, and massive robots, to life

Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills.

America was in the middle of a post-war economic boom during the ’50s and industries were in a rush to build the future, often with outlandish results. RCA-Whirlpool was busy whipping up the “miracle kitchen,” chock-full of mod-cons to make the Jetsons jealous, and Simplicity Mfg. Co.’s air-conditioned, bubble-domed lawnmowers arrived to ease the painful process of landscaping. General Electric (GE), a longtime hotbed of innovation and research, had various projects underway, including engineer Ralph Mosher’s Cybernetic Anthropomorphic Machine Systems (CAMS). Mosher was building man-amplifying tools that would allow users to control robotic appendages with natural human movement. Not to be left out, the US Army was plotting the future of rough- and remote-terrain vehicles, and it had its eye on GE and Mosher’s work.

GE’s man-amplifying machines

Consulting engineer Ralph Mosher and GE’s VP of research and development Dr. Arthur Bueche

The CAMS project was dedicated to fine-tuning human-control systems, since autonomous robots were still a bit half-baked and would require more computing power than was available. Mosher built the controls so that machines could echo human movements with increased precision, while also augmenting the strength of its human user. In 1956, Mosher’s “Yes Man” project was highlighted in Life magazine, which touted it as a “chivalrous robot,” capable of such a delicate touch that it could assist a young lady with her coat and even take a selfie after picking up a camera (and not crushing it, essentially). An operator was able to control the robotic appendages because of Mosher’s “force feedback,” which helped mediate the level of pressure applied through its electromechanical claws. (Imagine a robot ripping off a doorknob as it attempts to simply open a door.) By sending back a portion of the sensory feedback from a remote manipulator to the operator, it helped the user gauge the appropriate level of pressure that should be applied.

In 1958, Mosher’s work had seen some iterative development and was now called “Handyman.” This time it was developed as a method for handling radioactive equipment, with an operator strapped into a harness that controlled a set of Doctor Octopus-like robotic arms from a safe distance. While there were definite military angles to the development, GE was also still building tools for the consumer market, and the benefits of applying this research to intuitively controlled industrial machines was apparent. By 1961, the Army decided to team up with GE in order to further the research on a “walking” vehicle concept, planning to incorporate Mosher’s CAM control as a way to drive its four “legs.” As the years went on, others agencies would get involved with GE and Mosher’s unique man-machine control interface, including ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), the DoD and the Navy.

In 1966, the Army contracted GE to build a working prototype of its quadruped design, which could be likened to today’s BigDog robot by Boston Dynamics except that it was “driven” by a human pilot and stood about 11 feet high. The “walking truck” was powered by a 90-horsepower, gasoline-fueled engine, weighed in at about 3,000 pounds and had four jointed legs in order to move around. The on-board operator would control the legs of the vehicle using pedals and hand controls; e.g., the driver’s right arm and leg would control the vehicle’s right front and rear legs, respectively. This imbued the machine’s movement with human dexterity and decision making, while leveraging its ruggedness and strength. The machine was able to lift a 500-pound load with one foot and rescue a jeep that was stuck in a mud hole.

In 1965, Mosher and the GE team began work on a parallel project that also used CAM controls and was developed by both the Army and Navy. It was called the Hardiman I, and where the original Handyman project was controlled from a distance, this time the user would sit inside an exoskeleton framework. The goal was to directly augment the wearer’s lifting ability so that it could assist in remote and restricted areas where access to forklifts and other heavy-lifting equipment would be limited. The Hardiman I was built and tested in separate sections, beginning with a single arm and leg, before the entire exoskeleton was assembled. The single-arm tests were largely successful, enabling it to lift a 750-pound load. The leg tests were more problematic, with difficulties in perfecting the feedback mechanism and mobility. When fully assembled, the Hardiman I would stand six feet tall, weigh 1,500 pounds and use a combination of hydromechanical (hands) and electrohydraulic servos (arms and legs) for control and motion. After years of development, however, the government’s contract ran out before a fully successful model could be completed.

We may not have seen the GE Hardiman I come to fruition, and the quadruped vehicle never seemed to catch on, but Mosher’s work definitely made an impact on future researchers. Marc Raibert, founder of the robotics company Boston Dynamics, said, “The GE walking truck was one of those inspirational projects some of us remember from when we were kids, just getting interested in technology.” Although Raibert’s projects, like BigDog, are not built around human controls, there is some crossover with Mosher’s research at GE. “Ralph’s designs had captured the key ingredient of force feedback; in his machines, the forces were fed back to the human operator to give him or her a sense of the environmental interaction of the limbs under control. In our designs, force feedback is still important, but the control algorithms running on the computer [are] the target of the feedback: same principle with a different implementation.” The concept of massive, heavy-lifting exoskeletons seems to have fallen out of favor as well, in lieu of smaller supportive devices. Companies like Ekso Bionics have employed the technology as a rehabilitation tool and assistive device, while military developers, such as Lockheed Martin and its HULC exoskeleton, have opted to work on flexible field units for subtly amplifying load capacity and endurance. There doesn’t appear to be a single, unified path of development for man-amplifying and robotic technology; instead, researchers seem to be sampling from “a kind of technical stew,” as Raibert puts it.

[Images courtesy of the Museum of Innovation and Science]

Filed under: Science, Alt

Comments

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: blue lava, biodegradable batteries and a self-cleaning t-shirt

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

China is facing a pollution crisis. In cities like Beijing, the smog has gotten so thick it’s often difficult to see the sky – which begs the question: Does China’s capital need an artificial sun? The problem isn’t confined to China’s borders, either: A new study has shown that Chinese pollution is crossing the Pacific Ocean, affecting the western US. Could geoengineering provide a fix? To deal with the problem, scientist Yu Shaocai has proposed using giant sprinklers that spray water into the atmosphere of heavily polluted cities like Beijing to clear toxins out of the air. Air pollution isn’t the only way humans are shaping the environment — people in northern European cities have recently witnessed a mysterious aurora borealis-like glow that is caused by a combination of manmade light pollution and ice crystals trapped in the air. The natural world has plenty mysteries of its own: Photographer Olivier Grunewald recently captured an amazing set of pictures of an Indonesian volcano that erupted with rivers of blue lava.

For all the environmental problems the world is facing, there are people committed to righting the ship. The European Union just reached a landmark climate deal that is the world’s toughest and calls for 27 percent of all energy to be produced by renewable sources by 2030. Over in the UK, large-scale solar PV installations grew by an incredible 600 percent during the past 12 months. And in London, workers recently completed the world’s largest solar bridge, which stretches over the River Thames and is covered with 4,400 photovoltaic panels. In other solar technology news, researchers recently developed an inexpensive paper solar panel component made from wood fibers that is greener than the materials currently used. NASA Earth Observatory just released beautiful satellite images of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, and scientists at Virginia Tech developed a cheap, biodegradable battery that runs on natural sugar and could replace conventional batteries within three years.

It’s also an exciting time for innovative green architecture. The modern world runs on artificial lighting, and Belgian company EcoNation has figured out a way to provide natural indoor lighting without using a lick of energy in buildings where skylights would be inefficient. The company’s new LightCatcher domes capture incoming daylight that is then reflected and focused before being transmitted inside a building. For those who like to have all the comforts of home when camping, South Korean studio ArchiWorkshop designed a “Glamping for Glampers” tent that is shaped like a donut. A class of students at Green Mountain College is turning heads in the design community for building a 70-square-foot pod-shaped house that includes a sleeping area, rainwater collection and a 120-watt solar power system. And the company Siemens recently opened the greenest office building ever built in Masdar City.

In other tech and innovation news, Aamir Patel recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for a “self-cleaning” T-shirt made with nanotechnology that is almost impossible to stain. New York City-based artist Sebastian Errazuriz immortalized his ex-girlfriends by producing a series of 3D-printed replicas of their shoes. And for an even weirder use of 3D printing technology, 3D Babies just raised the bar. The company specializes in producing exact replicas of unborn babies that are priced from $200 to $600.

Filed under: Misc, Science

Comments