On a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York three years ago, Dennis Hong was captivated not by the giant blue whale, or the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, but by the ankle bone of a timid prehistoric deer.
The “double pulley” ankle gave the creature more bounce in its stride, an evolutionary advantage that enables today’s suburban deer to bound gracefully over vegetable garden fences.
Hong took out his iPhone and snapped a picture of the diagram. He thought the concept might work nicely on his next robot.
Another time, Hong watched a mother braid her daughter’s hair and wondered whether a robot could move in the same way. That led to the development of a three-legged walking machine that maneuvers about with the same braiding motion.
A Chinese water-tube toy inspired Hong to create a species of robots that move by continuously turning themselves inside out. A cowboy’s lasso spurred him to build a robot that wraps around surfaces like rope.
And that prehistoric deer’s ankle? It became a knee bone for CHARLI, Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence, America’s first full-size, two-legged, walking humanoid robot.
Hong, 40, the son of a famed Korean aeronautical engineer, is the Leonardo da Vinci of robots. Leonardo saw birds in flight and imagined a human flying machine. He studied human anatomy and in 1495 sketched what is considered the world’s first robot.
Like the artist, Hong innovates by connecting things that less creative types — meaning most people — might see as completely unrelated. His visions of pulleys and gears spring to life in a workshop in the basement of the mechanical engineering building at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg.
That’s where Hong and a tight posse of 18 engineering students operate the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), a relatively new and audacious entrant to the robotics field.
Virginia Tech’s engineering school ranks 24th in the nation, according to the latest graduate rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Penn all field bigger, older, better-funded robotics programs.
But none of them has Hong.
He arrived at Virginia Tech in 2003, still in his early 30s, with a baby face and a thick shock of black hair. There, working with a small team of bleary-eyed graduate students and a shoestring budget, Hong built several of the most compelling designs to emerge in American robotics.
Hong and his students “are really trying to change the world,” said Daniel Lee, a robotics researcher at Penn who collaborates with Hong.
Hong’s dream, though, has always been to win RoboCup, a little-known international competition that is one of the premier academic events in robotics.
RoboCup is an annual soccer tournament for robots. Designing a robot that can find and kick a soccer ball is termed the ultimate challenge in robot design; not long ago, no humanoid robot on Earth could do it. The goal is to field a robot team by 2050 that can beat the human World Cup champions.
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