Would not the dog/four legged system work out better? You could still have it manipulate items with forelegs if you wanted but keep the inherit stability
Most robots are not bipedal, for the reasons you state, among others. But if we want humanoid robots ever, we have to get started working with the form factor. There are plenty of technical problems to solve that are specific to this kind of platform.
This robot => (more steps here ) => C3-PO => Terminator => Roy Batty.
DARPA has a great record of pushing hard on technology that might sorta kinda work, but if it does it will have huge impact. Some of it works out better and faster than expected, with the ARPAnet as the prime example.
Because most of the parts of the world that are designed, are designed for bipedal things that occupy about 1.5 feet^2, and are about 6ft tall.
Think about bigdog trying to walk through a house. It would have a lot of problems, because the house wasn't designed for something that looks like that.
Well, actually big dogs do quite well walking through a house. They're quite popular. They just need to make BigDog a little smaller, and I think the four-legs approach would work quite well.
The reason is that human size and shape allows for replacing a human in any situation such as driving a vehicle or fitting into airline seats or what have you.
A robot that drives a vehicle can be an integral part of that vehicle, likely far cheaper than a humanoid robot that fits in the seat (and also shares the human driver's disadvantage of poor peripheral vision.)
Exactly. Entering a vehicle was one of the challenges in the most recent DARPA evaluation of teams developing high level control software for this robot.
As you can see, balance is not an issue with quick enough joints and good software. The current ATLAS can easily balance on one leg. The other leg is just there to provide locomotion.
This robot => (more steps here ) => C3-PO => Terminator => Roy Batty.
DARPA has a great record of pushing hard on technology that might sorta kinda work, but if it does it will have huge impact. Some of it works out better and faster than expected, with the ARPAnet as the prime example.