{"id":6417,"date":"2016-12-24T00:07:56","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T16:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/?p=6417"},"modified":"2016-12-09T11:13:24","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T03:13:24","slug":"meet-ballu-uclas-humanoid-blimp-robot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/meet-ballu-uclas-humanoid-blimp-robot\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet BALLU, UCLA&#8217;s Humanoid Blimp Robot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By <span class=\"author-name\"><a href=\"http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/author\/ackerman-evan-\">Evan Ackerman<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>This article is obtained from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/automaton\/robotics\/humanoids\/ballu-uclas-humanoid-blimp-robot?utm_source=Tech+Alert&amp;utm_medium=Email&amp;utm_campaign=TechAlert_12-08-16&amp;bt_alias=eyJ1c2VySWQiOiAiOWUzYzU2NzUtMDNhYS00YzBjLWIxMTItMWUxMjlkMjZhNjE0In0%3D\" target=\"_blank\">here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-6418 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/files\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTI2Mg.jpeg\" alt=\"mjgzmti2mg\" width=\"620\" height=\"456\" srcset=\"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/617\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTI2Mg.jpeg 620w, https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/617\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTI2Mg-300x221.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">Image: RoMeLa<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">The 2016 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots kicks off today. It\u2019s taking place at\u00a0the Westin Resort &amp; Spa\u00a0Cancun, which sounds <em>awful<\/em>, but at least there are some cool new robots, and one of the coolest has\u00a0to be BALLU, from Dennis Hong\u00a0at UCLA\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.romela.org\/\">Robotics &amp; Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa)<\/a>. BALLU, or Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit (Professor Hong loves a good acronym), is a humanoid-ish robot with a body made of helium balloons and a pair of thin articulated legs. Since it weighs next to nothing, it never falls over, and can walk, hop, and perform a variety of other useful bipedal motions as long as you don\u2019t take it outside on a windy day.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"BALLU: Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EdSoUbXirVI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo get creative ideas, sometimes we ask ourselves crazy, ridiculous questions,\u201d Hong told us.\u00a0\u201cOftentimes these lead to crazy, ridiculous answers, which lead to ingenious ideas.\u201d He added: \u201cWe asked ourselves, \u2018What if we could change the direction of gravity?\u2019 and this led to the concept of BALLU.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Strictly speaking, BALLU is more like a hybrid airship than a blimp: It\u2019s not lighter than air, so it doesn\u2019t float by itself, and requires some assistance (legs, in this case) for support and to control its motion. Since the robot\u2019s legs don\u2019t have to handle a bunch of weight, they can be skinny little twiggy things, and in fact there\u2019s just one single degree of freedom per leg, in the knee. The knees are cable driven, with the actuators in BALLU\u2019s feet, along with communications and power components. This results in a robot that has the majority of its mass at ground level, making it intrinsically stable, even as it walks forward, walks backward, steps sideways, turns, hops, and more. When we say \u201cmass\u201d we\u2019re not talking about much: As you can see in the video, BALLU can walk on water.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-6419\" src=\"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/files\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTU1MQ-300x300.jpeg\" alt=\"mjgzmtu1mq\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/617\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTU1MQ-300x300.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/617\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTU1MQ-150x150.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/617\/2016\/12\/MjgzMTU1MQ.jpeg 620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">Photo: RoMeLa<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Of course, BALLU is not the kind of robot that\u2019s ever going to carry anything heavy, or do any kind of substantial manipulation tasks: Hong describes it as more of a \u201cwalking information device,\u201d whose main asset is the fact that it is\u00a0lightweight, low cost, and inherently safe. BALLU is in the very early stages of development, and at the Humanoids conference this week, Hong and RoMeLa grad student <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/sepehrghassemi\">Sepehr Ghassemi<\/a> are just presenting the above video along with a short abstract. The video does give some exciting hints as to what they\u2019re working on next, though: There\u2019s a quadruped version, a version that can carry more payload, and a version with some kind of articulated upper body. Hong also told us that they have a method that allows BALLU to climb or jump over very tall structures, although they haven\u2019t implemented it just yet. We\u2019re definitely looking forward to videos of all of this stuff, as well as more new robots from RoMeLa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Evan Ackerman This article is obtained from\u00a0here. Image: RoMeLa The 2016 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots kicks off today. It\u2019s taking place at\u00a0the Westin Resort &amp; Spa\u00a0Cancun, which sounds awful, but at least there are some cool new robots, and one of the coolest has\u00a0to be BALLU, from Dennis Hong\u00a0at UCLA\u2019s Robotics &amp; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6477,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6477"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/haslinasarkan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}