
MegaBots calls it a day, puts fighting robot up for sale on eBay - worstestes
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/megabots-calls-it-a-day-puts-fighting-robot-up-for-sale-on-ebay/
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magashna
Those giant robots are years away from having the mobility needed for
entertaining combat. I feel like we peaked with BattleBots nearly 20 years
ago, early on before the spinning doom meta took over. There was fun stuff
like that bot that had a net in a giftwrapped box, basically begging for a
spinbot to tear into it and get paralyzed. Young me has a lot of nostalgia for
that, but the new season they tried was not great.

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drakenot
What kind of advances do we need to make for robots of this size to have the
kind mobility that people would generally expect?

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myself248
Financing.

MegaBots was founded by a couple of controls engineers who had done the math
and figured they could make a real bipedal walking mecha with current
technology, if only someone else would fund it.

Not that much money materialized, also falling on your face hurts when your
face started 15 feet in the air, so the current gen went with a tracked base
instead. But the tech can be done, we just need to get the pilots out and the
money raised.

~~~
Animats
There's no market. You can build it, but so far, they don't come.

Honda's Asimo. Boston Dynamics's Atlas. Schaft's humanoid (probably the best
one to date). Deere's legged logging machine. All never got beyond a few
prototypes. None of them work well enough to do anything useful.

I used to work on this stuff, back in the 1990s. I have two patents in that
area. (The big insight is that legs are for traction control - you can mess
with the contact normal in useful ways. As soon as you get off flat terrain,
traction control dominates the problem.)

I could never see a market for legged machines. Too expensive for toys. Not
useful enough for much else. Boston Dynamics has gone from sugar daddy to
sugar daddy for decades - first DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. Today, they
finally launched a product, their cute little all-electric Spot robot.[1] No
price given.

[1] [https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot](https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot)

~~~
smokelegend
2019 Atlas...

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E)

~~~
Animats
That's very nice. They finally got a more general control model. That's
progress. The first flip from that crowd was two decades ago. Now they have a
way of generating and following more complex motions. "80% success", they
write, so there's a ways to go yet.

I wonder what they use for actuators. What you want for running and gymnastics
is a spring with adjustable spring constant, zero point, and damping. A
pneumatic cylinder can do that, and can store energy briefly between motions.
Humans, when running, recover about 60%-70% of energy from stride to stride.
(Cheetahs, 90%. That's how they run so fast.) Hydraulics can't do that very
well, although there have been some attempts with hydraulic accumulators.
There have been attempts to do this mechanically, with two motors and a
spring, but they're bulky. Direct drive electric motors can do it, but if you
have a gear train, the inertia of the motor is multiplied by the reduction
ratio and you lose the ability to absorb shock loads. Also tend to break gear
teeth. ("You cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field" \- early electric
locomotive selling point.) I once thought that direct drive linear motors [1]
were going to be the answer, but those never got popular. (Aura, the main
company in that field, had some nice technology and a big financial scandal.
Their web site looks like a placeholder now. It's one of those areas where
hard problem + limited demand -> no products.)

There's a hack called a 'series elastic actuator', which is a powered screw
jack with a stiff spring on the end, used to fake more general springs. When
absorbing energy, the motor runs fast to back off the screw jack and unload
the stiff spring. This recovers no energy; it uses power when absorbing
energy. It's used in research robots where battery life isn't an issue.

It took Boston Dynamics about $120 million to get to the "legged squad support
system", the militarized Big Dog. No idea how much it took to get to a usable
Atlas.

It's good that they're still trying. The question is how much patience and
money Softbank has left.

I wish Schaft had made it. They were a University of Tokyo spinoff, bought by
Google and dumped by Google. They used small liquid-cooled motors, so they
could run the motors much harder than usually done. Like Tesla's motors, but
far smaller.

[1]
[http://www.aurasystems.com/actuators.html](http://www.aurasystems.com/actuators.html)

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corodra
I'm not trying to be too much of an ass... but is anyone really surprised? The
whole thing seemed like a gag from the beginning. Was it really taken
seriously? Reading that it has problems with soft dirt is kind of sad too.
Plus, it took them $2.5m for just the robot? I hope that's incorrect in the
article and those funds include business expenses too. Because that's really
bad management... wait, it all makes more sense now.

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2muchcoffeeman
I’m surprised this was a company. I thought it was some one off build for a
bit of fun.

~~~
corodra
Right? I kind of feel like I'm taking crazy pills finding out this was meant
as a serious company.

~~~
madamelic
At least it wasn't VC-funded.

Can't wait for the RFS for "giant robots"

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thoughtpalette
I do want to say I met Matt Oehrlein at a maker-space in Ferndale, MI before
he went on to create MegaBots. The guy is crazy talented with his hands, as
well as a super personable and kind person.

I'm sure he'll have some more cool and fun endeavors in the future. Will be
keeping a lookout for his name!

~~~
myself248
You should know that makerspace is not bankrupt, actually alive and well after
10 years, and expanding (having signed the lease on the other half of the
building, and raising funds to build it out) right now!

Come on back for a visit, you'll find a welcoming community and tons of
creative stuff going on.

~~~
thoughtpalette
I wish I lived there! Was a really cool space.

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worstestes
one of my favorites from their FAQ in the eBay listing:

 _Third, Eagle Prime has a lot of hydraulic hoses and connectors. During the
course of operation, it will usually spring a hydraulic leak maybe every 4
hours or so of driving and crushing. So far, every leak we’ve been able to fix
with a standard set of large wrenches and a replacement o-ring. I’ll include a
bunch_

~~~
kfarr
Another gem: > The giant cannon may or may not work since we used it as a
battering ram in the fight with japan, but it should be repairable.

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throwaway66920
Amused that it is listed as pre owned on eBay

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Ajedi32
> Seller Notes: “A few dings and dents from engaging in close-quarters nation-
> on-nation combat for technological supremacy with Japan's most famous giant
> robot.”

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nickthegreek
ebay link has some shots of the cockpit.

[https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480](https://www.ebay.com/itm/133181448480)

15 tons!

~~~
asdfman123
15 tons? What do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.

~~~
waste_monk
Giant robot don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my funds to the company bank

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bdcravens
"So we’re selling the assets of the company to pay back the bank as much as
possible, before we file the final bankruptcy paperwork."

I thought when bankruptcy is inevitable, you'd want to wait for the final
judgment before liquidating.

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Mathnerd314
I guess the market is in small robots, e.g. the micromouse competitions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683)

YouTube doesn't even like robot fights: [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-
style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-
style/gadgets-and-tech/news/youtube-robot-combat-videos-animal-
cruelty-a9071576.html)

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smokelegend
Have you seen the 2019 Atlas... brilliantly scary!

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E)

~~~
ASalazarMX
The slight wear on its body makes it look even more impressive.

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29athrowaway
It would have been better with no humans inside the robots, so the fight could
be more violent.

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rozab
More violent fights would ruin their already-awful profit margin. Since they
don't want to smash up the robots anyway, may as well put a human in there

~~~
29athrowaway
BattleBots is more entertaining to watch.

They tried to add some excitement with commentary, but it didn't work.

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ChuckMcM
Wow, I cannot believe I'm seriously considering bidding on this thing :-).

