Robert Playter

speaker

1,075 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2023 last heard Apr 2023

Robert Playter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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It was hard to get a go-kart engine driving a hydraulic pump.

Oh, is that what it was?

And having that all work while trying to get the robot to stabilize itself.

And so many of the early versions of Big Dog had literally go-kart engines or something like that.

Are those gas-powered?

Yeah, gas-powered two-stroke engines.

And the reason why it was two-stroke is two-stroke engines are lighter weight.

And we generally didn't put mufflers on them because we're trying to save the weight.

And we didn't care about the noise.

And so these things were horribly loud.

But we're trying to manage weight because managing weight in a legged robot is always important because it has to carry everything.

That said, that thing was big.

Yeah, I mean, the early versions, you know, stood about, I don't know, belly high, chest high.

You know, they probably weighed maybe a couple of hundred pounds.

But, you know, over the course of probably five years...

we were able to get that robot to really manage a remarkable level of rough terrain.

So, you know, we started out with just walking on the flat and then we started walking on rocks and then inclines and then mud and then slippery mud.

And by the end of that program, we were convinced that legged locomotion in a robot could actually work.

Because going into it, we didn't know that.

We had built quadrupeds at MIT, but they used a giant hydraulic pump in the lab.

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