MIT hopes robo hero effort pays off to help in disasters
A robot with the brawn of a machine and the quick reflexes of a human is being developed by MIT researchers, who hope to some day be able to send it into danger zones instead of putting people at risk.
HERMES, now a year and a half in the making, was inspired by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
“The idea here is you have a humanoid robot that you can send into a disaster situation, with someone operating it remotely,” said Albert Wang, a mechanical engineering graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It would be used when you can’t send a person, but you can send a robot to do human-like work.”
HERMES is the size of a small adult and configured like one, with two arms and two legs — designed to be able to easily navigate structures that were built for humans, Wang said, to climb ladders, turn nobs, and tinker with valves in ways only human-like appendages can.
But the robot cannot operate on its own — it’s controlled by a human wearing a suit hooked up to motors and wires, that will translate its operator’s innate human motor skills and sense of balance to the machine.
This allows the operator to maintain coordination that can be difficult to achieve with a machine on two unwieldy legs without natural reflexes, Wang said.
There are four sensors in the robot’s feet, and the suit is equipped with mechanisms that give the controller a jolt at the waist to signal the need for balance control.
The robot is equipped with cameras in its head, which gives the controller a view of its surroundings.
“The suit is kind of like an exoskeleton,” Wang said. “You can move your body in a certain way and the robot is going to copy all of that, and take advantage of your abilities.”
The machine, which is now being tested with tasks like punching through drywall and smashing cans, is controlled through Ethernet cables — wireless technology would present too many connectivity risks that could complicate already dangerous situations, Wang said.
“Ethernet cords can run several hundred meters, so that means that we have some flexibility for distance,” he said. “Wireless has some issues. You don’t want a spotty connection.”
The research is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Before HERMES can be put to use, Wang said, researchers are trying to find the optimal combination of robotic and human qualities to make it most effective.
“At the moment, we have the person fully controlling almost everything about the robot. But we know there’s a lot of algorithms that can help us,” Wang said. “It’s about finding the respective strengths and weaknesses and finding the proper combination of when is the computer suited to do the task, as opposed to when you are.”