The two-legged robot is named HERMES, and has the ability to punch through walls, smash soda cans, karate-chop boards in half and generally wreak havoc. The robot can act like a kind of puppet that can act with precision.
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The real-time force feedback dynamic is demoed in a video and the sensations felt by the human operator appear to be instantaneous and comparable to the force experienced by the robot. Rather than crashing to the floor with the momentum of landing a punch, HERMES can shift his weight and right himself as a well-coordinated human would. The human controller will wear an exoskeleton, which provides him or her with feedback on what the robot is doing and feeling.
But MIT’s new “Hermes” robot is a bit more graceful and human-like than the other entries this year.
“The processing of images is typically very slow, so a robot has difficulty reacting in time”, said Joao Ramos, one of the researchers at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, in a news release. In its current iteration, HERMES is controlled primarily by the human operator, but fellow PhD candidate Albert Wang sees a future where HERMES gains a bit more independence. That’s something that feels effortless to us, but it’s challenging to program into a robot to do it both dynamically and efficiently. Human-like robots with similar dexterity would be prime candidates for entering tackling environments that would be too risky for human first responders (after all, what better than a humanoid robot to explore environments that were designed for and by humans).
“We plan to have the robot walk as a quadruped, then stand up on two feet to do hard manipulation tasks such as open a door or clear an obstacle”.
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In the future, assuming that we (hopefully) don’t need to use robots to fight off ancient Godzilla-like creatures or an army of self-aware robots, HERMES would presumably be suitable for use in such applications as search and rescue, military/defense, firefighting, and perhaps even more.
