Robert Playter

lifelike or elegant or just natural looking.

And so I think if you get the physics right, it also ends up being more efficient, likely.

There's a benefit that it probably ends up being more stable in the long run.

You know, it could walk stably over a wider range of conditions.

And it's more beautiful and attractive at the same time.

Our first humanoid, we needed to deliver natural-looking walking.

We took a contract from the Army.

They wanted a robot that could walk naturally.

They wanted to put a suit on the robot and be able to test it in a gas environment.

And so they wanted the motion to be natural.

And so our goal was a natural-looking gate.

It was surprisingly hard to get that to work.

But we did build an early machine.

we called it Pet Man Prototype.

It was the prototype before the Pet Man robot.

And it had a really nice looking gate where it would stick the leg out, it would do heel strike first before it rolled onto the toe so you didn't land with a flat foot, you extended your leg a little bit.

But even then, it was hard to get the robot to walk when you were walking that it fully extended its leg and essentially landed on an extended leg.

And if you watch closely how you walk,

you probably land on an extended leg, but then you immediately flex your knee as you start to make that contact.

And getting that all to work well took such a long time.