HERMES the humanoid robot does not taken kindly to being attacked. In fact, if you were to punch him, his "human reflexes" would cause him to punch you right back.
He wouldn't stop there either -- he might go onto to punch through drywall, smash fizzy drink cans, kick things over and karate chop things in half. Before you back away in terror, it's important to remember that it is not actually HERMES you should be afraid of -- it's whoever is controlling him.
HERMES is operated by a person wearing an exoskeleton, and the reasons his reflexes are so "human" is because he is, in fact, mimicking precisely the actions of that person. When the exoskeleton wearer punches, HERMES does too.
HERMES has been developed by researchers at MIT to showcase his unique balance-feedback interface. Rather than crashing to the floor with the momentum of landing a punch, HERMES can shift his weight and right himself as a well-coordinated human would. Similarly, anything HERMES comes into contact with impacts the human in the exoskeleton suit -- forcing them to react to anything that might throw the robot off balance on its behalf. This relies entirely on the split-second reflexes of a real human -- a robot equipped that had to rely on visual feedback from a camera would be likely to fail in righting itself. "The processing of images is typically very slow, so a robot has difficulty reacting in time," explains PhD student Joao Ramos. "Instead, we'd like to use the human's natural reflexes and coordination. An example is walking, which is just a process of falling and catching yourself. That's something that feels effortless to us, but it's challenging to program into a robot to do it both dynamically and efficiently. We want to explore how humans can take over complex actions for the robot."
Despite HERMES' punching prowess, he has never been intended for fisticuffs -- instead Ramos and the team working on the robot imagine that he might one day be deployed in disaster zones, allowing humans to interact with the environment without putting themselves as risk. "We'd eventually have someone wearing a full-body suit and goggles, so he can feel and see everything the robot does, and vice versa," Ramos says. "We plan to have the robot walk as a quadruped, then stand up on two feet to do difficult manipulation tasks such as open a door or clear an obstacle."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
