
Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Sweats - mcspecter
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/this-robot-can-do-more-pushups-because-it-sweats
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sp332
You can go the other way and add closed-loop cooling to a person
[http://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove-
research-0...](http://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove-
research-082912/) Apparently it's been commercialized already
[http://www.avacore.com/](http://www.avacore.com/)

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bagels
These are used extensively in endurance automobile racing, and in desert
racing. Keeps you much more alert, especially in hot environments.

Well, not the glove, but a shirt and or pants:

[https://store.windingroad.com/fast-cool-suit-system---no-
air...](https://store.windingroad.com/fast-cool-suit-system---no-air---no-
shirt-p90.aspx)

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joshu
I wear a cool shirt even for sprint races (30 minutes) - it can be 110 degrees
at the track and the nomex fire suit gets hot.

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djrogers
This is brilliant. Evaporative cooling is extremely efficient, and the use of
laser sintered aluminum in the support structure to facilitate it is flat out
genius. It's like we're living in the future.

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artursapek
I'm really amused by the artistic pointlessness of a robot doing push-ups.

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anigbrowl
It's not pointless. It's a familiar enough exercise that people can get a
realistic idea of the energy expenditure this robot could be expected to
perform in the field with the right control software.

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fairpx
We humans look smart when we manage to create a bad copy of a tiny part of
nature. How small we are.

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Zikes
To be fair, nature had a 3.5 billion year head start.

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gumby
Ah, but unlike nature _we_ get to use intelligent design!

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pavanred
And, we came up with an emulation of a product of billions of years of
evolution in this case.

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taylodl
Being as it's early in the morning and I'm still blurry-eyed, I thought the
headline read 'Robot Can Do More Push-Ups Because It Swears.' Now _that_ would
have been an interesting article to have read!

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cfmcdonald
Those are some really crummy push ups. Get your chest down to the floor,
Private!

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agumonkey
related to man vs horse
[http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/long...](http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2012/06/long_distance_running_and_evolution_why_humans_can_outrun_horses_but_can_t_jump_higher_than_cats_.html)

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highd
I wonder how effective the micro-porous aluminum is at transferring heat from
a cooling fluid to a heat sink. That might be useful even in active, non-
evaporative cooling systems.

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rosser
Isn't heat transfer very closely tied to surface area (among other things)?

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highd
That's my thinking - so this should have crazy surface area.

You could make some really awesome aluminum parts. Create a dense exterior
with some interior "strut" infill structure and a very porous fill and put
plumbing fixtures on the ends. Super strong, lightweight parts that you can
cool at crazy rates. I wonder if this would work for aerospace? IIRC cooling
the components exposed to exhaust can be a big limitation.

~~~
gumby
Oh man, keeping the flow laminar over all those transfer surfaces, and of
course increasing the work because of the obstructions to flow...so many fun
engineering problems!!

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Gravityloss
Rocket engines have been probing these kind of technologies for decades, and
it's been proposed for re-entry vehicles too. Called transpiration cooling.
Only more recently, with additive manufacturing, it's become a lot cheaper to
integrate into the structures. I haven't read of anyone actually using it.

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dmix
As soon as I saw the robot's face mask I knew it was going to be Japan.

