Watch out for this guy at the gym, hogging the benches and not wiping anything down.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo invented a humanoid robot named “Kengoro” that cools its rippling robo-“muscles” with a mechanism much like human sweat, IEEE Spectrum reported.
Videos by VICE
Instead of fans or sinks, the heat throw off from Kengoro’s 108 motors is displaced by circulating water around its skeleton. The water seeps out and cools the robot through evaporation. They claim it’s three times better than air cooling.
In their video demonstration, we see the roboticists thwacking Kengoro with a… piece of something else from the shop? Then he’s down on the mat doing pushups, with better form and stamina than most of us internet-dwellers possess.
Dude’s small but jacked: At 5 feet 5 inches, and 123 pounds, Kengoro’s bones are laser sintered from aluminum powder. The laser sintering fabrication process lets builders control permeability in fine detail — some parts are completely solid, while others are more like a sponge, allowing water to travel through the bot’s body.
A cup of deionized water keeps Kengoro going for half a day, and it can bang out pushups for 11 minutes straight.
The harbingers of our sweaty robotic revolution presented their work, “Skeletal Structure with Artificial Perspiration for Cooling by Latent Heat for Musculoskeletal Humanoid Kengoro,” at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) this week.
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