Yes, as you can see if you watch carefully. That's disappointing. Legged locomotion technology is far enough along to make that work standalone. Maybe they could get Softbank to get them some consultants from Boston Dynamics. BD has gone to electric robots, so the people who did the hydraulic machines may be available.
If you didn't notice, most of the footage was shown at 4x speed, or 2x speed. It's extremely slow to move any part of this monstrosity. There is no way it would be capable of walking freely with the slowness of the mechanics. It's a completely different story at this scale, Boston Dynamics doesn't have a way to make that work.
Yes, even if they wanted to, making joints which can withstand such dynamic loads, while being small, and lightweight will be a giant engineering challenge.
60t static load, now imagine how big will it be when it walks.
It takes serious engineering. And it's been done.The Dragon, from Zollner Elektronik AG.[1] About a third of the size of Gundam, mostly so it could be transported by road.
True quadruped. Best engineering in the giant robot space so far.
The Sultan's Elephant [2] was bigger, but less technically advanced. The headaches of transporting it were too much of a problem. Once your art project gets bigger than what can be moved by road or rail, there's a problem.
The Land Walker, from about 2006, was about a third of the size of the big Gundam. Biggest walking biped to date.[3]
There's also Eagle Prime, which is really a tracked vehicle.[4]
Indeed, baby steps. At first I thought it was CGI because of the feet-induced cognitive dissonance but then I saw the waist-level support moving in the shadow behind.
Still fascinating to see this towering thing in motion. I was never into Gundam, but Macross Plus had me hooked, and this brings back memories such as this scene:
In hindsight there are so many anticipatory things in Macross Plus, it’s really good SF trying to reason from first principles: AR virtual canopies, neural link operated plane, deep AI generated musical arrangement from simple human composition, Kessler syndrome, drone vs human presence on the battlefield, overall human relevance in the face of emergent AGI...
