Speecys-FC: 1st Fuel Cell Powered Robot

Posted 30 Jun 2005 at 14:12 UTC by The Swirling Brain

A Japanese robot company Speecys Corp. has developed a small bipedal walking robot powered by fuel cells. They claim it's the first robot to run on fuel cells. The robot has a 16 liter hydrogen canister and fuel cell on it shoulders and can run about an hour on the tank. The about two foot tall robot has the computer tethered via wireless network. The robot to go on sale in July will be priced at about 2.5 million yen (US$22,850). More pics can be found on their Japanese site. Use the fish to translate the page from Japanese to English.

16 liter?, posted 30 Jun 2005 at 14:20 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Wouldn't a 16 liter tank be like huge? I wonder if the article is correct?

First?, posted 30 Jun 2005 at 14:42 UTC by steve » (Master)

Actually, it's not the first. There have been previous commercial fuel cell robots such as the R-Gator autonomous ground robot developed for the military. Also, Toshiba's ApriAlpha personal robot can be powered by an optional methonal fuel cell. Let's see there was NASA's Helios UAV, Sohgo's C-4 security robots (sorry, no links handy), and the homebrew hydrogen fuel cell robot built by the Mendocino High School Science Club a couple of years ago. I'm sure there are others. It's probably like the claims we used to see of the "first robot vacuum cleaner" every couple of years until the Roomba came out.

16 liters, posted 30 Jun 2005 at 14:47 UTC by steve » (Master)

16 liters is probably the uncompressed volume of the hydrogen. It could be either compressed in a gas cylinder or a stored in hydride type tank. Here's a photo of a 60 liter metal hydride tank - it's 2" in diameter by 4.5" long.