History
The term and its principles were developed by Tad McGeer in the late 1980s. While at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, McGeer showed that a human-like frame can walk itself down a slope without requiring muscles or motors. Unlike traditional robots, which expend energy by using motors to control every motion, McGeer's early passive-dynamic machines relied only on gravity and the natural swinging of their limbs to move forward down a slope.
Read more about this topic: Passive Dynamics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)