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:
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)