Poor Exhausted Littledog

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuBIclGG3R0]

This video of littledog doing some terrain navigaion excersizes is just hilarious. We really don’t have any technological updates since last time we mentioned him, but you should watch the video anyway. [Evan] at botjunkie pointed out how tired littledog must be to absolutely collapse at the end of each run. We started out thinking that his comment was humorous, but the bot is obviously going into a tidy configuration for carrying. As we watched, we saw that [Evan] seemed very correct. Littlebot completely collapses at the end of each run, toward the end of the video, it doesn’t even bother to fold up nicely, sprawling out in a very lifelike pose of utter exhaustion. We don’t know if this is intentional, but we think it should be.

23 thoughts on “Poor Exhausted Littledog

  1. The collapse at the end of the run is similar to how a runner in a track event leans forward as he/she crosses the finish line. Since the competition is based on time, teams do everything to shave off milliseconds even if its a silly looking collapse.

  2. Actually it makes me feel a little sad for the poor thing. Its makes it feel as if the things being run until complete exhastion. But these things are really interesting and would be useful, as long as they keep them away from skynet.

  3. Well in case you misse dit, look at the gray modular boards, the Dog walked the egde of the squares. He never went over that terrain. He just straddled it. Other than that I’m impresses

  4. i like it but i don’t like how it apaers to be jsut scripted just look at the steps. he tryed jumping again when there was no more steps and every time he goes till that little thing in the floor…

  5. very funny.

    on a technical note, take a look at the little circle of tape on the wood board after the course. looks like some sort of electronic tag to tell the bot to stop. he collapses every time he crosses it. are these guys planning to make “rfid tape” or the like to keep their littledog army within bounds?

  6. If this is the same competition I heard about in the spring the robot is functioning autonomously. Basically, the terrain is unknown beforehand and teams have a certain amount of time to process the 3-D map of the course and generate a plan to cross it quickly. This is done on a separate computer that is a decently powered workstation if I recall correctly.
    After the pre-planning period the robot then attempts to cross the terrain as you see in the video (easier said than done, there are advanced control algorithms developed for this).
    The tape is just a convenience for humans, its not special, all the timing is done with a vision system.

  7. The collapse at the end of the run is intentional: it saves the batteries, and it folds the legs so that there is no risk of braking them when you pick up the dog and put it away.

    Still cute.

    To Stuart: there is no vision system. There is a motion capture system.

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