Are you enjoying your Christmas?

Hello, and Merry Christmas, all of you out there in the real world!

How's your celebrations going so far? Everything's a bit dull around here, so I thought I might do a special post as a nice present!

I'm just waiting for "The Time of the Doctor," this year's Doctor Who Christmas special, on BBC America. It starts at 9:00 Eastern/8:00 Central.

 

 

 

This charming red robot is the first in Hallmark’s “Robots on Parade” series. I believe that I have the second one from 2001; unfortunately, I don’t have the third one from 2002.

Hallmark ornament artist Nello Williams designed it in the style of one of those old “tin toy” robots from the 1950s that ran on D-cell batteries. While it isn’t strictly Millennium-themed, it is in keeping with the theme of “what people in the 1950s thought the year 2000 might look like,” as we saw on the silver-suited Madame Alexander doll.

I’ve had this ornament for a long time, but I never thought anything of it until I noticed the very small “2000” inside the power gauge on its chest.

It's a little blurry, but if you look at it from the right angle you can see the "2000" marking.

It's interesting to look at this robot as an artifact from a past vision of the future because household robots are commercially available today, but they don't look anything like this guy. The most well-known "real robot" to date is the Roomba, a small, streamlined affair about the size of a dinner plate.

The central problem here is how to get a robot to walk like a humanoid with humanoid legs. The easiest way to get around this is to give it something like a dog's hind legs (the proper term is "digitigrade legs"), which are engineered for near-perfect balance and require much less movement than human legs. Find a video on YouTube of a running dog and you'll see what I mean: the "thigh" part is the only part that actually moves.

We humans, by contrast, have to use the thigh joint, the knee joint, the ankle joint, and the toe joints. For us, that's practical and elegant, but the smooth movement they deliver is extremely difficult to reproduce in a machine, which means that any attempt to get that "human walk" will result in the "clank-clank-clank" walk we associate with old-fashioned robots. (Even then, those robots have the additional "cheat" of wheels hidden in the foot mechanism!)

 As far as I know, this difficulty has not stopped some engineers from trying: I did read about a "pendulum"-based mechanism in Popular Science,  but it was still in the experimental stages. The robot itself looked like an oversized "bullet" with a pair of Erector-set legs sticking out of it, which means that it can't do anything but walk at the moment. So, at the moment, non-humanoid robots it is!