A Carnegie-Mellon prof has whipped up a human-sized robot that balances on a metal sphere. It’s like an inverse ball-driven mouse: motorized rollers constantly adjust the balance of the bot on top of the ball. CMU prof Ralph Hollis, who started out hacking robots as a hobby in the 1950s, thinks ballbots will be good company amidst humans, and much cheaper than bipedal robots. Why do machines have to mimic humans, when they can take advantage of capabilities humans don’t have…?
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