Advances in Robotics
Gil Pratt, PhD noted that the robotics industry is now 50 years old, so the era of the massive and stationary industrial robots is waning. Due to advances in materials and technology, modern robots are much smaller, lighter, and more mobile which means there may be more application in limb prostheses than was previously thought.
Dr. Pratt showed some fantastic video of various multi-articulated robots as they "walked", "ran" and even did back flips under laboratory conditions. Their research has shown that electric motors are inherently inefficient for powering limbs, so they are developing new type of series-elastic actuators that promise to be lighter and more powerful than would otherwise be possible.
He also demonstrated to practical value of today's massive computer power. In one of their recent robot designs, they used CAD to create a "virtual walker" that surrounded the body of the robot to help it balance. But they never actually built the walker in reality. They programmed the robot to act as if it had received the stabilizing forces from using the rolling walker, just as an elderly person relies on a walker to improve their balance. This virtual stabilization proved sufficient for the robot to ambulate successfully, even though it was inherently top-heavy and difficult to balance. They also used a "virtual hare" to guide the robot rather than to build an actual track for it to follow in the lab.
Some of the walking robots had surprisingly anthropomorphic gait patterns. For more information on these and other Leg Lab projects, including some video clips, visit: www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/robots/robots.html