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[Starver]

Wheeled form? For roads?

Spoiler: Where we're going, we don't need roads! (click to show/hide)

Also...

[Reelya]

Yeah, flying 10 ton robots around will be much more efficient than rolling.

[Trekkin]

The big benefit of sticking the walker on a truck is that the walker doesn't then have to carry the truck, which is the N^2 problem that even sensible multi-terrain vehicles face: everything to cross terrain they aren't crossing is dead weight, and every mode of transportation they include has to carry all the others. Walkers are inefficient enough without having to add half a truck's worth of extra load.

As an ancillary benefit, if you don't need the truck, you can leave it and its fuel and maintenance behind. You can get another one if it breaks, or swap it out for a different one better suited to the local conditions, all without interfering with the walker. A hybrid vehicle is just a bigger load to carry through terrain it's not equipped to go through, so there's no benefit there, and trying to make it really all-terrain runs into the aforementioned problem of making everything carry everything else, to the point where it's carrying reinforced snowshoes and waterproofing and an extensible bridge and goodness knows what else instead of whatever payload it's supposed to be carrying -- and even if it's modular, the capacity required to carry the unused modules won't be separable from the chassis, so now we're carting that around too.

[Kagus]

So, really what we need is just something with a 3D printer and the ability to extract carbon and/or silicon from the environment in order to produce the necessary parts on the fly, discarding them when no longer needed for traversal.

An elegant solution!

[Trekkin]

So, really what we need is just something with a 3D printer and the ability to extract carbon and/or silicon from the environment in order to produce the necessary parts on the fly, discarding them when no longer needed for traversal.

An elegant solution!

Great for emergency use, too. Everyone can just sit patiently in the disaster area while we print the emergency vehicles, and if they die waiting it's basically a form of triage, right?

[dragdeler]

what if the bipedal robot crosses a river

Are you assuming that the thing swims like a human  ? (sry that was a bit mean)


I think it's incredibely unlikely that bipedal performs better than, tracked vehicles, drones, four or more robolegs, or whatever we might come up with, in any sensible setup.

[wierd]

And here I was gonna say that he had invented organic life...

(Carries around the machinery to produce new instances, and is able to undergo whole somatic reformation in some instances. Absorbs materials from the environment as needed.)

[Starver]

(By the way, the argument presented two(+3, ninjas!) posts up is equivalent, in many ways, to the arguments I have against multifunction printer/scanner/copier/faxes/teas-maids/trouse-pressers/sexbots. Only insofar as desk space usage (and computer-off operation, at least until they make all the items IoT-ish and inter-operable from a minimal number of separate control panels) are you actually gaining some advantage by cramming several seperately failable items in a single box such that.often the whole suit needs to be discarded if just one internal feed, belt or module fails and you can't get an economic repair. That and getter the trouser press and sexbot functions mixed up. In two ways, my trousers have never quite fit the same since...)

[wierd]

Personally, I prefer the convenient and durable instant orgasm helmets, but I suppose not everyone can use them.

[Kagus]

(By the way, the argument presented two(+3, ninjas!) posts up is equivalent, in many ways, to the arguments I have against multifunction printer/scanner/copier/faxes/teas-maids/trouse-pressers/sexbots. Only insofar as desk space usage (and computer-off operation, at least until they make all the items IoT-ish and inter-operable from a minimal number of separate control panels) are you actually gaining some advantage by cramming several seperately failable items in a single box such that.often the whole suit needs to be discarded if just one internal feed, belt or module fails and you can't get an economic repair. That and getter the trouser press and sexbot functions mixed up. In two ways, my trousers have never quite fit the same since...)

So, she's a bit toit then innit?

[Max™]

Well, I think they got one of the most important bits of sexbots due to the uh... jiggle properties of tpe and similar materials, as for bipedal bot transport, a bit of creativity should let something like a stance change allow mechanisms already used for upright motion to be repurposed for faster/lower ground pressure transport without an extreme weight increase.

Gotta get away from stuff like "heavy electric motor per joint" though.

[Starver]

Minimalist-actuator solutions are possible, but I'm not sure I'd go quite that far with bipedal locomotion, or any polypedal gait that isn't so leg-numeric that fine control for balance isn't an issue.

(See also for a more friendly description.)

[smjjames]

what if the bipedal robot crosses a river

Are you assuming that the thing swims like a human  ? (sry that was a bit mean)


I think it's incredibely unlikely that bipedal performs better than, tracked vehicles, drones, four or more robolegs, or whatever we might come up with, in any sensible setup.

It depends on what you're (or rather, the robot) doing and the environment it operates in.

[dragdeler]

It depends on what you're (or rather, the robot) doing and the environment it operates in.

Of course but my bet goes on the robot that ressembles an insect more than a human, 99 out of a 100 times.

[Trekkin]

Minimalist-actuator solutions are possible, but I'm not sure I'd go quite that far with bipedal locomotion, or any polypedal gait that isn't so leg-numeric that fine control for balance isn't an issue.

Minimal-actuator solutions work great unless you need to move multiple joints simultaneously. Or every joint simultaneously. Like for legs.