HERMES is a humanoid platform
that we've been trying to develop
in order to deploy into disaster
situations scenarios. So you
want to be able to deploy a
human, but once its too dangerous
to deploy a human itself we
wanted to be able to deploy
something that could do work as
a human would be able to.
So the way I like to think about
this project is that we're trying
to put the human's brain inside
the robot. So we want to take
advantage of what humans can
do. Humans can learn and adapt
in order to face new situations
and challenges that we may not
predict. For humanoid robots or
legged-robots in general,
keeping balance is critical to
being able to carry out any task.
We've decided to tackle this
head-on by feeding the balance
sensations of the robot back
to the human as forces on his
waist. That way we can take
advantage of the natural
reflexes and the learning
capability of the human to be
able to keep the robot balanced.
So we try to give the human as
much freedom as possible. So the
suit is a full-body suit so the
human can move their arms and
both legs. And the idea is that
the robot is going to follow
exactly the same way. The human
also has handle controllers with
which you can push a couple
buttons and those buttons are
responsible for controlling the
hands of the robot. So for
grasping or releasing we control
the force that which the robot
is grasping this object very
firmly or loosely or even to let
it go. We also have a camera in
the robots head, where your head
would be, and that vision that
the robot sees is fed back to
the operator in some vision-
goggles. When the human wants
to do more delicate tasks,
like things that really require
vision and strict positioning,
he can use goggles and do a more
precise manipulation with his
hands. So currently we have the
whole actions taken by the robot
is commanded by the human but we
know that may not be the
ultimate solution for the problem
so we want to implement some
intelligence in the robot.
The human is still going to
provide that creativity that
problem-solving and the large
scale coordination of all the
joints. But we've designed the
robot to be stronger than a
person so we'd imagine that in
the future we want to merge some
level of autonomous control along
with the human's intelligence.