Flame is the name of a roughly human-shaped

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

, developed in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

by Daan Hobbelen of the Mechanical Engineering department of Delft University. Robot motion is more easily done with wheels, but this robot was designed specifically to study human walking. It is 130 cm tall and weights 15 kg. Flame is a continuation of Denise, another walking robot developed at Delft University, which featured in a

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

article in 2005. Just like Denise, Flame walks through controlled falling. It does not try to keep balance, but accepts that it loses balance and reacts to that by placing a foot such that it will stop the fall. Do this continuously, and the result is walking. The idea is that humans walk in the same manner. Flame uses just a little more energy than a human of the same weight. It turned out Flame walked most efficiently if the 'rear heel' is lifted the moment the 'front heel' hits the ground. Humans do the same. Flame works differently from

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

ese robots, which are generally based on assembly line robots and know exactly what to do when because the environment is fixed. For example, they can walk up stairs quite impressively, but only the set of stairs that they have been programmed for. According to Hobbelen this approach is a dead end. Flame is more flexible and reacts to changing circumstances.

References

External links

Homepage
* * {{Humanoid robots Bipedal humanoid robots Robots of the Netherlands Delft University of Technology 2000s robots