Robot arms in Steamboy
By Matt on November 20th, 2006.
Filed under: robot arms
2 comments ↓
Another for Jack’s collection of robot arms, this one from Steamboy (at IMDB), the anime steampunk movie about scaled-up Victorian locomotion and machinery:
Not much automation there, but a cracking rendering of regular-size mechanical gloves driving giant robot arms. It wouldn’t be the same without the mechanism exposed.
November 20th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
It wouldn’t be the same without the mechanism exposed.
Thinking a bit more about this. I meant that phrase just aesthetically… but more generally, when you augment human strength or reach using technology, I wonder how important it is to feed back that enhancement to the user? For example, a button that takes you to DEFCON 1 and invisibly scrambles a bunch of fighter jets is really easy to push, but it also activitates flashing red lights and a klaxon. And the ‘Send’ button in my email client makes a noise as it helps me reach across somebody else’s field of view.
With existing prosthetics, from artificial legs to head-mounted displays, what design parameters make the object more or less fascinating?
November 22nd, 2006 at 10:28 pm
I saw a mechanical arm at about that scale today, it was being used to demolish an office block by crushing the brick walls to dust, chunk by chunk. It was mounted to a huge caterpillar base, unfortunately the driver wasn’t using a exoskeleton, but a couple of joysticks.