Potential and active founders here should consider reaching out (i think a startup setting would suit him better than corporate research), though he’s obviously got his own stuff going on and a degree to finish!
It does make me wonder about the algorithm, Quite a lot of things I find on Youtube turn up on HN a week or two later. I'm not sure if this is an indicator of the effectiveness or failure of the algorithm. It is definitely succeeding in finding videos popular with some people and showing it to more who might share that interest. The question is, are the things I (and consequently many others of similar interests) see the best of all there is, or a subset of the excellent videos out there that happen to get noticed.
I sometimes find channels that are years old with a goldmine of good information. That suggests that there is more good stuff out there than what I see. Were they just unlucky that I didn't see them before? Am I lucky to be seeing them now? It also might be that it is not luck but the algorithm has arbitrarily decided that the video has some special factor that requires promotion or that I have passed some arbitrary threshold of perceived character development that makes me supposedly now interested in such things.
> It does make me wonder about the algorithm
If I'm misremembering or missed something please correct me. I'm out now but I'll try to find the video of him talking about gating when I'm back if someone hasn't already linked it.
Also, I love how YouTube has all these "small" creators doing extremely impressive stuff. It's a real shame the algorithms make discovery challenging. The beauty of something like YouTube is not about just getting something to watch, it's by being able to get access to any content. Search is always a difficult problem to solve but I'm afraid it's currently over optimizing for views rather than intent. Which, to be fair, is much harder to measure. But I say over optimized because frequently I can search the title with 90% accuracy and fail to find the video. Something minor like missing an "s" or something effectively non meaningful. It's extremely frustrating...
I wanted to start writing a list of other tech related, pop-sci and industrial-design Youtubers I kinda enjoy, but noticed just how many channels I'm subscribed to... If there's any interest, I'll drop it, just tell me. Meanwhile I have some filtering and sorting to do.
I got a bit more time today, so maybe today evening (German time), elsewise I'll have to skip Friday, so likely Saturday afternoon.
0. High Precision Speed Reducer Using Rope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwIBTbumd1Q
1. Building a DIY Surgical Robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_8rHKrwr-Q
The advantage over gears is that overloads are distributed over much more material. You don't snap gear teeth. This is good for leg landing shocks.
[1] https://www.impact-fibers.com/info/unveiling-the-strength-ke...
Steel cables would work just as well if weight isn't a consideration, but I think Dyneema is likely to be more resistant to abrasion. However, heat produced by any significant dynamic friction will ruin it immediately, as I found to my sorrow. Kevlar is much more heat-resistant, and of course steel is more heat-resistant than Kevlar.
The implications of the tools we now make available for use in our own personal workshops are still being discovered, and will be for some time.
"CARA (Capstans Are Really Awesome) is my latest quadrupedal robot, following ZEUS, ARES, and TOPS. Built over the course of a year, CARA is easily my most dynamic and well-designed quadruped yet."
Much better for someone to fund a startup run by him.
Hire him and put him in R&D in some robotics company.
I was a professor for a long time. My observation was that often a top researcher was also a top teacher and even a top administrator. There are exceptions of course. But if someone is smart and effective at using their attention, those skills transfer to many things.
It’s a pain in the ass when allocating university roles. I want that person to do EVERYTHING ‘cos they always deliver.
On top of studying engineering at uni, his "side-gig" is being creative, empathetic, and fantastic at communication - and your prime recommendation is to "hire" him to be a specialist hidden away in the back office? Which interwebz forum are you on?
EDIT: My last question is clearly an echo-chamber statement. But that doesn't subtract from the fact that, yeah, should he found a business, yes, he'll deal with certain "BS". That is the weight we'll all carry. But he's quite likely capable of moving civilization forwards, so... :shrug:
But for a lot of tech/engineering channels, it'd be immensely difficult to make the same salary as you could working at a FAANG or the like. (I'm making about half what I made when I had a W-2, but it's enough).
It definitely gives off Elysium (film) vibes.
> the 33kg robot runs at 22 km/h (6 m/s). The total power consumption from the battery pack was 973 watts and resulted in a total cost of transport of 0.5, which rivals running animals’ at the same scale. The 76% of total energy consumption is attributed to heat loss from the motor, and the 24% is used in mechanical work
Cheetah was the robot built by Ben Katz, which then went on to electrify Boston Dynamics' dog.
Given we've had no major energy density or motor efficiency breakthroughs since 2015, I bet the above still holds. That's a 30 min run at full throttle BTW. So to escape the current killer bots, try to run above a 2h marathon pace for 30 minutes.
Source: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/108096/Effici...
The platform in the video and the robot dogs from Boston Dynamics are ideal for tasks where they are only limited by their own weight and the amount of computing power required to navigate, such as exploration.
I suppose that's why we mostly see autonomous delivery robots on wheels.
Or maybe I am being too pessimistic about other platforms...
Also, I wonder how resistant this mechanism is to wear and fatigue.
And you can't really declare your design is "high precision" and present yourself as someone others should take transmission design advice from if you aimed for a gear ratio of 8 and achieved "somewhere around 7.9 to 8.2"
It's also interesting because competing actuators with strain-wave, cycloidal, or planetary gearboxes will state exactly what the ratio is. The actual gear teeth may not be spaced out perfectly around the circumference, but the number of teeth is an integer with an infinite number of zeros.
He actually discussed this in an earlier video for his initial tests on the capstan drive. He ended up testing the rope he used for around 358 hours (two weeks) on continuous use in the drive itself with very low backlash
That's why pro crews don't use gears and ropes. At high impulses deformations and elasticity throw the kinematics off what's actually happening. Modeling the deformations and the elasticity is a computational no no. Instead what you see is the motors right on the joints.
At least that was the case last time I had a look at robotics.
The answer here, as with so many things in robotics, is: It Depends.
UR10e robot arm that can lift a 4kg object with a reach of 1m and has sub-1mm repeatability? Strain wave gears in the base and shoulder joints, 100:1 ratio.
MIT Mini Cheetah robot dog that can do backflips? 6:1 planetary gearbox.
Shadow Hand with 20 degrees of freedom? Tendon driven, with the 20 motors in the forearm to keep the fingers slim.
Little dinky Huggingface SO-101? Servo motors, integrating 1:345 gearing with a series of 6 tiny brass gears.
Mid-price CNC milling machine, if you call that a robot? Really long ballscrews, driven by stepper motors.
>Mid-price CNC milling machine
A ball-screw is mostly decorative on small machines... =3
Sure. Yet evolution has achieved astonishing kinematics with all manner of deformation and elasticity inherent to the materials, and also constantly changing physical properties, using low resolution data. We cannot build permanently lash free mechanical devices at reasonable cost and reasonable size/weight. Eventually, the answer must be pervasive real-time compensation throughout the kinematic model.
> Modeling the deformations and the elasticity is a computational no no.
Why? Nervous systems do this. That's why you can change your shoes and still walk upright.
the motors were so sloppy the company wasted a ton of money [0] having me write heuristics to tackle the errors they accumulated over several hours.
one of his whole points is that by using dyneema (rope), there's almost no elasticity at all in the capstans.
[0] relative to the cost of better motors
That sounds like “It’s not wrong, we just don’t do it”. There are some amazing examples of imprecise drive systems compensated for by excellent control systems all over the world, for millions of years.
Isn't having more decimal places the exact definition of precision (vs accuracy)?
Breaking Taps on YouTube did a really awesome video on a somewhat similar mechanism (I'm no mechanical engineer haha, it was new to me!), rolling contact joints. I love the idea of using string/ropes. Worth checking out as well if this kind of stuff interests you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQiLLcumqDw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Jh1daCl60
https://github.com/evildmp/BrachioGraph
Sample Supply List for $80 budget:
Pi Zero with header $20: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6008
Power supply $9: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1995
SD Card $10: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1294
Three hobby servos $18: https://www.adafruit.com/product/169
Breadboard wires $5: https://www.adafruit.com/product/153
Breadboard $5: https://www.adafruit.com/product/64
Glue, popsicle sticks, pen and paper $10Or if you're already all over the basics, figure out what kind of stuff you want to build and then try and build it. :)
Time to raise my own bar.
Edit: And yes of course, in hindsight, you don't build a leg unless you're planning to build a thing with legs.
Update: Ah, weird, if I watch the non-embedded one on youtube it is the original in English with normal sound. It's the one embedded on his web site which has AI translation to German.
As an end user, there's nothing you can do to prevent from seeing them. But you can change the audio track to the original while the video is playing.
WHAT?!? It a time when there is a growing animus towards AI generated content, for many content creators this would be tantamount to slander
I feel this deeply, also this whole video is quality content.
Anyway good engineering requires extensive testing over many hours of movements.
He actually discussed this in an earlier video for his initial tests on the capstan drive. He ended up testing the rope he used for around 358 hours (two weeks) on continuous use in the drive itself with very low backlash
I'm surprised that Ukraine isn't DIYing full-on solid motor cluster SAMs and armor piercing ATGMs. I thought those kinds of devices were something just about any sufficiently developed country can do in days to weeks should such national emergency arises and all bets were off, except nations in peacetime has moral obligations to do no evil.
CARA is a super cool project which is never going to kill anybody, but it's another piece of evidence that the cost of the technology for such weapons has decreased enormously.
That said, talking about the dread is going to get boring fast, because nearly every story on the HN front page is catapulting us toward that future.
You're talking about a whole bunch of targeted and intentional attacks in a literal warzone, the most lawless kind of place on the planet and you're complaining that they are hitting their intended military targets?
Meanwhile Gaza is boring to you, because Israel uses conventional bombs with humans in the loop, even though the collateral damage matches your prediction today.
Geordi LaForge reminds me of Aaed.
You're assuming you'll be the only one with those capabilities aren't you?
The video is the epitome of applying solid engineering principles. Where most stop at a minimal viable working example, it sails past that and gets real work done solving foundational problems, using a waterfall approach that expands leverage at each level of abstraction. Complete with outside-the-box thinking and insights which help save the viewer from repeating unnecessary steps, so that the end goal is reachable using modest tools and readily available materials.
I would gladly work with Aaed, and I must admit that I am jealous that he and his friends are living out the dreams that my friends and I had in the 1990s.
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The Boomers didn't quite understand what we were trying to accomplish, as they had already done the important work of manifesting the equality that had previously been a dream in the US, so these sorts of innovations were gravy. But Gen X was raised on Star Wars, so will not be withholding mental energy from future generations. Unfortunately we are also victims of trickle-down economics, so have little to pass forward except for wisdom gleaned from the school of hard knocks.
We had everything we needed to build these exact types of projects except for the time and resources that were hoarded by our elders. So the vast majority of us worked our lives away, barely making rent by prospecting the internet as miners for people with money, without ever striking gold in the vast majority of cases. Then watched as the fruits of our labors were used to build McMansions, expand monopolistic enterprises like private equity firms, or be simply wasted on frivilous expenses instead of reinvested in automations to create residual incomes. This led to us developing mental health issues like addiction due to the misalignment between the lives we had to live vs what might have been.
Then we lost our heroes, like when Y Combinator went from an indie startup funder to a vetting VC like all the rest. And when Elon Musk pulled up the ladder behind him after accomplishing so much, then used his wealth to dismantle the social safety nets which make indie work possible. I don't believe that these statements are political, as they objectively describe the unwritten history of how some became so wealthy while most struggled, and the irony that I write this as I stand on the shoulders of those fallen is not lost on me.
Now we have everything we need to build R2D2 and C3P0 right now, today.
So I'm hopeful that the next step will be to create a meta economy within the status quo that distributes resources outside of the artificial scarcity created by the previous dominant systems of capitalism, socialism and communism. I believe that a gift economy loosely resembling solarpunk has the potential to liberate humanity from forced labor so that every individual has the opportunity to self-actualize in a reasonable time frame and still experience the joys of leisure time and youth.
In practice, this will expand wealth redistribution models like Patreon and the WiX Toolset maintenance fee under an umbrella similar to the Humble Bundle, to level out long-tail effects and socialize gains while privatizing losses. Note that this works exactly the opposite of how most major economies work in the world, with the exception of nations like Norway which uses its sovereign wealth fund from nationalizing its oil companies to pay its citizens a pension that may someday become UBI.
I realize that these points are mostly excuses and platitudes. But they are in no way meant to diminish the efforts of hackers - on the contrary, they are intended to bolster them by adding meaning to the work and convey why it's so important to those that came before.
So I write this out today to record in the annals of history that the nature of the problems we face is no longer technical, but spritual.
When I came across this amazing project and wanted to share it to HN, I was debating whether to post the youtube link or the project page. I decided to post the project page and mention the youtube link in the description for those who prefer video, but somehow that description got posted as a comment instead (not sure how that happened?). Anyway as you said the video is embedded in the project page so it wasn't really necessary