Locomotion ends in a stereotypical tripod stance, freeing the dextrous hand for dedicated use. Machine vision is impressive in manipulation tasks, especially when it works at all in an unstructured environment. Pa will be rather blind at first and kinematic performance will be correspondingly limited. Attitude and acceleration sensing, contact detection and force feed back are the primary sources of data for kinematic processes. Progress will be incremental in squeezing performance from the sensor data.
Current work involves evaluation work by project engineers with two test-bed platforms.
Sensory feedback for kinematics is a real-time critical task. Much of the sensory processing is therefore dedicated hardware and software, decoupling its performance from the vagaries of the meta system. At right is the most basic centering of all motions based on the NASA zero G neutral posture. The conjecture is that this stance provides the greatest potential functionality for a limited flexibility body such as the ProtoAndroid. The ProtoAndroid Carcass Page covers the actual body.