Bottom of the barrel dangerously over-scraped
Hello internets. How are you?
On Monday we had a highly esteemed visitor at our lab, a professor from the French Academy of Sciences, who specialises in walking robots. The video below features the experimental setup she works with, called the "Rabbit" for some inexplicable reason (although she is not in the video, and the video is mostly in French):
Some of you may have seen the giant walking robots from Honda etc and be wondering just what is so special about it. The special thing is that it has no feet, and must dynamically maintain balance as it steps forward, like walking on stilts. The Sony and Honda robots have such large feet that they could stop at any point in their motion, and not fall over. Dynamic balancing is much tougher mathematically, and a lot of the work I am currently doing is directed towards this sort of problem, so it was good to talk with her about their approaches.
I was supposed to spend a week at her lab (in Nantes, on the Atlantic coast of France) from the 20th to 25th of Sept, but unfortunately it clashed exactly with Mandy and Dean's visit to Umeå, but perhaps some other time. She was asking quite pointed questions about what I wanted to do After Umeå.... so France could be my next home... who knows?
Whilst I'm "talking shop", as the yanquis say, I've started to add pages to my official web site describing my current projects. I won't link here, since I don't really want Google to associate the two pages, but if you search for my real name it pops up near the top. It has come to my attention that basically nobody has any idea what my job is actually about (or even if I really have one)... but no excuses from now on!
On a lighter note, my last remaining Aussie in Umeå (Tiff) came back here recently, and brought me a DVD of the Late Show, Champagne Edition. Lots of solid gold material I'd forgotten all about, particular: "okeee dokeee give me the ball!" (Rob sitch (as Graham or the Colonel) as a very Swedish Stefan Edberg, trying to get a tennis ball back from a cocker spaniel, which has replaced all the ball boys at Wimbledon). He really gets the accent spot on! I've been saying it all week. Okee dokee give me the ball!!!
On Monday we had a highly esteemed visitor at our lab, a professor from the French Academy of Sciences, who specialises in walking robots. The video below features the experimental setup she works with, called the "Rabbit" for some inexplicable reason (although she is not in the video, and the video is mostly in French):
Some of you may have seen the giant walking robots from Honda etc and be wondering just what is so special about it. The special thing is that it has no feet, and must dynamically maintain balance as it steps forward, like walking on stilts. The Sony and Honda robots have such large feet that they could stop at any point in their motion, and not fall over. Dynamic balancing is much tougher mathematically, and a lot of the work I am currently doing is directed towards this sort of problem, so it was good to talk with her about their approaches.
I was supposed to spend a week at her lab (in Nantes, on the Atlantic coast of France) from the 20th to 25th of Sept, but unfortunately it clashed exactly with Mandy and Dean's visit to Umeå, but perhaps some other time. She was asking quite pointed questions about what I wanted to do After Umeå.... so France could be my next home... who knows?
Whilst I'm "talking shop", as the yanquis say, I've started to add pages to my official web site describing my current projects. I won't link here, since I don't really want Google to associate the two pages, but if you search for my real name it pops up near the top. It has come to my attention that basically nobody has any idea what my job is actually about (or even if I really have one)... but no excuses from now on!
On a lighter note, my last remaining Aussie in Umeå (Tiff) came back here recently, and brought me a DVD of the Late Show, Champagne Edition. Lots of solid gold material I'd forgotten all about, particular: "okeee dokeee give me the ball!" (Rob sitch (as Graham or the Colonel) as a very Swedish Stefan Edberg, trying to get a tennis ball back from a cocker spaniel, which has replaced all the ball boys at Wimbledon). He really gets the accent spot on! I've been saying it all week. Okee dokee give me the ball!!!
posted by I-Rock at 10:21 PM
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