It's clear they made this weird on purpose but still, so many questions...
the robot hangs suspended from the ceiling as its limbs twitch and kick, marking what the company claims is a step toward its goal of creating household-helper robots
Oh yeah, definitely a huge step in that direction...
Clone Robotics designed the Protoclone with a polymer skeleton that replicates 206 human bones
That's all of the bones of an human adult. Yeah, I'm sure absolutely all of them were necessary.
I don’t understand these companies’ obsession with humanoid robots. A robot doesn’t have to humanoid to be a useful household helper. It doesn’t even have to be humanoid for people to form a friendly bond with it (something I think would be a good quality in a “household helper”) just look at Star Wars droids
Some of this is also about less complicated ways to use patents that can also be applied to things like prosthetic limbs.
Also, it provides a control case with how well-studied human anatomy is. In terms of basic mechanical motion, there's a clear baseline goal.
I remember seeing early versions of the synthetic muscle fibers years ago, but as far as ways to practically apply them and test, and refine them as control technology improves with machine learning. 10-15 years ago, this wasn't really possible.
It's definitely made that accurate/creepy for marketing reasons, they're probably hoping this will help them get investors. I would also assume you can simplify the human body design a good bit before losing the functionality we actually want from something like this.
No, it's pretty much only you thinking that. The rest of us were thinking about the 6 tiny bones in the ears only used for hearing or dozens of weird little bones in the wrists and ankles.
This kind of thing could actually be really beneficial for prosthetics. If we can make a robot that functions as close as possible to a human body at human size, then we can chunk it up to make prosthetics that work like your original limbs and are easy to adapt to.
There is another video, showing only the torso. It has no music, but the actual sound and this is not even less terrifying https://youtu.be/gl0GnzPIOl4
From what I'm reading there this is a measure of mass flow rate of gas, expressed as volume per minute at some standard volume and pressure. Which makes some sense, you need those two parameters to be fixed so you can measure mass by volume.
And then I realized the OP article uses it for a fluid liquid 😂
Volume changes based on temperature and pressure. So when we reference volume measurements like for flow rates, we typically do the math to adjust those to standard temperature and pressure. Standard pressure is 1 atm but standard temperature varies based on who you're talking to because of competing standards. It's usually 25 C or 20 C.
When we want to reference the non temperature and pressure corrected volume, we append actual to it so that people know what the measurement is. Some people don't do that and that causes confusion for others using their work if the reading is standard or actual.
Let's ensure we also make household robots unreasonably strong and durable. We don't want shotgun wielding humans to be able to disable one, or barricade in a house.
A 500-watt electric pump serves as the robot's "heart," pushing fluid at 40 standard liters per minute.
As usual, when you read the article you stumble upon a gigantic technical hurdle. 😕
EDIT:
And I'm not against the technology. I'm all for prosthetics and humanoid robots for menial work.
Just imagine the possibilities if full human-pike prosthetics are developed. Think of people who have lost their arms or legs, suddenly being able to walk again.
Someone on reddit had the idea that people working on this thing are probably recording audio logs onto individual USB-sticks, which they then leave scattered all over the facility.
There's that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were "too human" looking and which unnerved customers.
The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.
Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.
While it seems spooky having a whole body twitching, I do appreciate the research being done.
I think we should be excited about these things. Mainly because research like this will lead to better prosthetic limbs for those who need them. We don't need Terminators or Robomaids, but we do need more natural robotic arms and legs for those in need.