Submitted by Sariel007 t3_108andc in Futurology
duh, humans are just biological machines evolved to be efficient
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Sariel007:
>In their experiment, they compared how a muscle and a traditional direct-current (DC) motor would lift a weight up from the ground. The DC motor will yank the object with the maximum amount of force it can apply at that moment and will continue doing so as it lifts the weight.
>"The construction of muscle, however, allows for a more fluid, continuous and gradual movement," McGrath said. "Muscle can smoothly lift the object that does not require it to continuously yank on the weight as with all of its power."
>To have their motor behave like the fluid, energy-efficient muscle, the researchers used a device called a proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID), which works like cruise control in a car. The PID can recognize an error between the current speed and the set speed of cruise control and corrects by increasing or decreasing the force.
>Muscles have been shown to provide performance advantages useful for robotic systems, such as energy efficiency, stability, or increased range in motion. How muscles create these performance advantages, however, still remains largely unknown.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/108andc/physicists_have_discovered_that_mimicking_human/j3r040n/
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Thinks it's safe to say that an Arduino controlled spinny cow head hasn't got much to do with the article.
i think its the thing.. it's just a motor with a PID controller/ algorithm to control the force applied to be more like a muscle
The steers head is because it's from the university of texas austin.
Why is this noteworthy?
PID control loops have existed for over 100 years. I started working in controls engineering about 10 years ago and PLCs could automatically tune PID control loops for you. You don't even have to program it, you just tell the PLC to tune the loop and it figures it out on its own.
To emphasize this is not a new physical type of motor rather it's a new mathematical control model applied to the electronic control system controlling a DC motor.
The second point I question with this is the 22% stat. Given the emphasis on PID control I'm thinking they're 'typical' electric motor is one with a control system where they just give full continuous power which is not realistic, I don't think I've ever encountered a motor in any application without some form of control on it. Motors always slowly step up their voltage using PID or another control scheme, not doing so add huge stresses to parts and wastes energy so they're 22% is likely much much less when compared to real applications.
Not to be a jerk, but DUH. Not to your post but to the "epiphany" that the article seems to be having...
Humans are basically the most advanced computer/robot.
They can find (and already have and do) much in nature to mimic ad base designs and ideas from.
Wow, ya think? I watched a video of some robot back in the 90s and wondered why they weren’t trying to use this approach.
What a nothing article that explains little about the actual motor.
can we at least see a demo of their motor beating out the traditional motor?
All I saw was a lock being pulled up by a spinning shaft.
I wish this was obvious to everybody
I'm not aware of any servo controlled or VFD controlled motor on the market that doesn't come with an integrated PID loop. Most even self tune.
This article is the equivalent of saying "hey guys, did you know if you use uncompressible liquids you can use high pressure to apply more force, I'm going to call it HYDRAULICS!!!
PID controllers have been in use since the 1920s.
It explains little because PID control has been in use for at least 100 years.
You can't buy a motor and controller that doesn't have a PID style control loop. If you buy a VFD or servo controller, it will have an integrated PID control loop, and it will probably even self tune.
3 billion years of development will have some pretty efficient designs.
"Breaking news: Planes look like Birds.. coincidence? We think so!"
I mean, nature has already done most of the R&D. Why not?
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True to some degree, but there are no wheels in the animal kingdom..so not all biological machines the most efficient
Next will come the cosmetics. Pretty soon you will not be able to tell a robot from a human.
I'm just trying to picture how a wheel would look evolved on a living organism... like it would require the ability to spin freely and I can't think of a single thing that can do that in nature
There isn't , there are some animals that can coil themselves (centipedes, caterpillars) into a shape of a wheel/circle and roll or have the wind push them, but no none in the animal kingdom. I suspect because a free rotating wheel would be disconnected from the body that grew it...
Came for this, thanks for vocalizing my frustration! It seems like they're cherry picking the worst case scenario for energy usage as a baseline to compare against.
I think the larger issue is that wheels don't scale well beyond flagellum type structures on a single cell; there isn't a path to scaling up to a larger wheel.
Millions of years has gone into creating a human, pretty sure it’s not a inefficient “machine”.
If this was the case humans wouldn’t have made it this far.
Why human muscles and not, say, chimpanzee muscles?
Further clarifying this is not a new control model.
PIDs were invented in the 1910s and implemented in the 1920s.
Today, VFD and servo controllers (what control most motors) come with PID controllers built in, and many can tune themselves.
This reminds me of the biologists that published a paper reinventing calculus.
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Surely this is common sense, years of evolution is of course going to lead to a form of design that is going to be on course for the most effective and efficient way in doing [x].
Out of curiosity, are you reading the headline, the news article written by an undergraduate Spanish major, the abstract of the paper, or the paper itself?
'Cause I'm looking at the guy's CV and it looks like he definitely knows his way around control systems
Yeah I’m still trying to understand what’s different about it. I get the power rate is adjusted to run in the most efficient range, I guess it does this by itself by slowing the speed when current is higher for heavier objects? Then you reduce BEMF while pushing higher current? Not sure what’s game changing about this or how it relates to muscles at all.
They're not claiming that they invented anything new about PID.
This is what the paper says in the abstract:
"A proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller converges the characteristically linear FV relationship of a DC motor to nonlinear Hill-type force outputs."
There doesn't seem to be anything new here. PIDs have existed for over a century. I've programmed PIDs and even more complicated control loops myself.
There's even more complex forms of PIDs like cascade controllers, where the output of one PID sets the setpoint for a second PID:
Inputs -> PID1 -> PID2 -> Output
Modern PLCs autotune PID loops for you. I've never seen an industrial motor controlled without an integrated PID loop, ever, in over a decade in the industry. Not one.
Edit:
Here's the Wikipedia link.
I read the abstract. It also says
>In this study, we first construct an easily amendable, bioinspired electromagnetic motor which produces FV curves that mimic the Hill model of muscle with a high degree of accuracy.
It sounds like they built something, but motors are admittedly outside my area and I can't be bothered to log in for the full article.
Anyway, my point is that if you read the PIs publication list, there's a lot connected to control systems, so it seems premature to say "lol MDs discover the trapezoid rule," is more likely than "student journalist fails to write in-depth review of highly technical work. "
Edit: even if they're just demonstrating the relative optimality of the Hill curves, that's still publication worthy
Doesn’t have much to do with anything, there’s no promise in evolution for “perfection” and there are things our bodies happen to be inefficient at, even in the context of our last environment, but efficient enough for enough of us to survive, again why
What I quoted, follows what you quoted. It explains how they did it.
I'm not saying it is or isn't publication worthy, I'm saying it's not some new technology that you're going to see rolled out in the coming years. It's how DC motors have achieved over 90% efficiency decades ago.
They all work the same way, so they could just say muscle.
Our Muscles, Their Exoskeletons, & a Cybernetic blend of Brains... w/ just a touch of Singularity.
Aunt Edna's - Perfect Doomsday Recipe
Serve & enjoy...
Planthoppers have gears, if that counts
Which honestly wouldn't be that big of a problem, we've seen crazier stuff in nature before. The issue is that a wheel is a bad and inefficient design for the surface of Earth, which is rough, sloped, covered with stuff, dry, sticky etc. As humans we didn't invent only wheels, we also invented roads to go along with them and leveled rock formations, hills, forests etc to build them. In a fully natural world without roads, wheels are useless.
This isn't even a new mathematical control model, I learnt to use PID control in my first year engineering papers and used it on literally this exact thing (driving DC motors).
Probably because wheels aren't very versatile compared to limbs, you can't defend yourself with a wheel like a foot or a fist. Also biologically difficult to grow since youd need some way of controlling them but I can't think how you'd do do the physical attachments in a biological sense since animals tend to be made up of long stringy fibers or hard shells.
Sariel007 OP t1_j3r040n wrote
>In their experiment, they compared how a muscle and a traditional direct-current (DC) motor would lift a weight up from the ground. The DC motor will yank the object with the maximum amount of force it can apply at that moment and will continue doing so as it lifts the weight.
>"The construction of muscle, however, allows for a more fluid, continuous and gradual movement," McGrath said. "Muscle can smoothly lift the object that does not require it to continuously yank on the weight as with all of its power."
>To have their motor behave like the fluid, energy-efficient muscle, the researchers used a device called a proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID), which works like cruise control in a car. The PID can recognize an error between the current speed and the set speed of cruise control and corrects by increasing or decreasing the force.
>Muscles have been shown to provide performance advantages useful for robotic systems, such as energy efficiency, stability, or increased range in motion. How muscles create these performance advantages, however, still remains largely unknown.