Also of note are the hands of Hermes, three-fingered claws that can pick up power tools, crush a soda can or even pour out a coffee. Using joysticks rigged up to the main exoskeleton, the human operator is able to pick up objects and interact with the surroundings with more precision than a robot of this type would usually have.
There are plenty of advantages to having a human operator control a robot in the field, because the machine benefits from thousands of years of brain evolution and the human being benefits from being able to stay out of harm's way (in the event of a natural disaster or in the case of a walk across an uninhabitable planet). The robot is able to directly benefit from some of the things humans can still do better, from keeping their balance to tightening a grip on an object.
PhD students Joao Ramos and Albert Wang of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering are behind the project, and they eventually envisage more robotic intelligence being added to the design.
"The human's still going to provide that creativity, that problem-solving and that 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," explains Wang.
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