BLURRED LINES: HERMES FUSES ROBOT AND HUMAN ABILITIES

New Human-Machine Interface Gives MIT Robot Human Reflexes

Being a roboticist is often a thankless task, you spend hours coding every minute movement your robot can make and yet still it mightn’t move the way you want. Researchers have experimented with many techniques to both speed up and improve the process, including using motion capture. Well now a team from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering is using this approach, with researchers strapping on a controller body suit that controls the movement of its bipedal robot HERMES.

The human pilot’s suit not only controls the robot, it also sends the pilot feedback via a suit of actuators. This means that when the robot throws a punch against some dry wall, it’s forward momentum can be arrested by the pilot’s sense of balance, essentially equipping the robot with human reflexes. The concept seems logical and quite simple, but it has taken a lot of work to achieve this type of control response and it really is quite amazing.

What’s brilliant is HERMES is not just mimicking the movements, it’s actually learning which compensatory ‘muscle’ movements are needed to counteract which forces, so that in the future it will know how to stay balanced. Ultimately when they have gathered enough information, the researchers want to start integrating human control with real robot autonomy; probably with the intention that they can someday phase out the human element altogether.