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spwa4today at 8:39 AM1 replyview on HN

TLDR: we don't have the actuators required to make humanoid locomotion work reliably.

Also: something every human actually kind of knows. You need to take impacts on muscles, not on mechanical connections. Even if we had the actuators required, you also need perfect control. The only way actuators can work this well is if they properly predict the impacts so that the power of the motor ("the magnetic field") can absorb nearly all the impact. If you try to take the impacts even on human bones (that are very solid and self-repairing) they will break surprisingly quickly.

My opinion is that the need for high reduction is only because we can't have high voltage on the motors. If we either had very small distances between the magnets and electrical wires (think micrometers), or we have voltages in the 100s to 1000s of volts, we don't have to make this poisoned choice. (in a way, VERY small distances between magnets and wires is how human and animal muscles do it. But they go all the way down to sub-10 nanometers)


Replies

regularfrytoday at 12:27 PM

Naively it feels like the improvements to resistive losses ought to be so dramatic from this that we must already be at some sort of equilibrium position. Double the voltage and divide the resistive losses by 4 - that's neither a trivial gain nor seemingly difficult to achieve? We're not talking kVs here.