Gill Pratt
Gill Pratt is the founding Chief Executive Officer of the Toyota Research Institute and Chief Scientist and Executive Fellow for Research at Toyota Motor Corporation. He previously served as a program manager at DARPA, where he led the Robotics Challenge and neuromorphic computing programs, and was an associate professor at MIT and a founding professor at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. He is best known for his academic research in robotics and intelligent systems, including the invention of series elastic actuators that use physical springs to reduce reflected inertia in robotic joints.
“That same gear that raises the torque, lowers the speed. Unfortunately, gear reduction causes something called reflected inertia. It's going to be as if the robot weighs a tremendous amount and it can really injure a person.”
Source→“Putting a physical compliance, a spring, in series with the output of that gear train removes that reflected inertia at the very high frequencies.”
Source→“Gil Pratt: Former MIT professor, later at Toyota Research Institute. Inventor of series elastic actuators — the insertion of a physical spring into a robotic joint to eliminate reflected inertia at high frequencies.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.