4 Legged Robot Put to Work Patrolling Power Station

AlphaAtlas

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
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We've seen some cool footage of 4 legged robots before, but up until now, finding useful work for them to do outside of niche cases like disaster response was difficult. IEEE Spectrum says that ANYbotics brought one of their ANYmal robots to an offshore power distribution platform, and put it to work. The robot can inspect parts of the platform that would normally require a human, and the contraption's 4 legs allow it to navigate obstacles like stairs and low, tight spaces with relative ease.

Check out the working robot in the video here.

Having said that, there are a few situations even in this demo video where ANYmal is not ideal - the poor little guy is on the short side, which makes it hard to read some of the gauges and indicators, and it looks like some electrical cabinets have to be left open for inspection since the robot can’t open them itself. These things could be solved without much work with a minimal redesign to environments like this to make them a little bit more robot friendly, which seems like not too much to ask to be able to have a robot patrolling out there instead of a human.
 
What about security/surveillance patrol also? That would also take many jobs.
 
ok, after watching the video i was really left with the feeling that they need to take it to the next logical level and mate it with a roomba :ROFLMAO:

but seriously, that would be a cool multi function device.. as it is cleaning the floors, it can monitor things.


keep the legs for the mobility thing, but when in the main flat surfaces, it "sits" on its belly and the legs lift up.. roomba action commences while it whirls around checking on things
 
Rahh said:
What about security/surveillance patrol also? That would also take many jobs.
Click to expand...
Black Mirror covered that.
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I had a dream I was staying in a very fancy hotel in the mountains. There was a four legged, dog like, robot jumping around the cliffs like a mountain goat patrolling to keep the riff-raff and bad guys away from us wealthy folks...probably come true some day.
 
Not to knock the concept or the technical accomplishment in any way, but... the maintenance on a contraption like this could easily take as much human time as is saved. And would require a highly skilled worker with test equipment, tools and spare parts, unlike the watchman replaced.

So - impressive, and a great idea someday; maybe no positive ROI now.
 
SCADA + security cameras > slow robots clumsily meandering the halls. Also, why would the author think the BUILDING should be designed around the robot? :confused:o_O WTF? Redesigning the robot for the environment makes a little more sense.
 
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