Walking: technology and biology

Abstract

If all the signs are to be believed, then the twenty-first century will technologically be characterized by machine walking and its relevant products, which possess all chances to become real bulk goods in the course of the next decades. With several university institutes and with Honda and Sony from the industrial side, Japan is today and without any doubt the leading nation in research and development of walking machines. The US and Europe follow at some distance. Walking machines will influence all areas of daily and industrial life and, with the fast evolution of artificial intelligence, will become a real partner of human beings. All relevant technologies are highly interdisciplinary, they will push the future technologies of all technical fields. The special issue on this topic gives a selection of walking machine research and development including some aspects from biology.

Walking within film: Gilbertson and Tait and insignificant steps within landscape

“…Within the sphere of developmental psychology, the child's acquisition of walking is observed as a long and complex environmentally influenced learning process, one in which the necessary strength and balance are constructed as muscular and neuronal habits; it is no innocent occurrence, but a constructed cognition within the body (Adolph, Vereijken and Shrout 2003). This developmental stage is forgotten, rendered invisible, unless by accident or chance the capacity must be re-learnt; research into how walking occurs is concentrated most productively upon the robotic field, where stumbling translations to the machine return it afresh as an urgent question (Alexander 2005;Pfeiffer and Inoue 2007). Correspondingly for an understanding of walking within cinema, it is essential to ask how on-screen significance arises for an activity embedded within human experience, but only actually observed if specific allocation is made.…”