Last night while in bed a question came to me. How do they test for endurance new shoe designs in factories? I did some searches and all it came was names of athletes that are paid for. I mean, they take the shoes and use them for training everyday until they brake. Then, the engineers can study the weak points. I was always thinking, in order to shorthen the prototype testing cycle, they must have some machines with mechanisms that imitate the motion of the human feet so they can test them continuously, 24x7. But probably no machine can imitate the more complex motion of the human foot. Those machines would probably end up by wearing different areas of the shoe than a human foot (and body) would do. Then it hit me. They must be using robots. Probably, dont advertise it. Cant find nothing on utube. Think about. Put one of these https://youtube/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0 on a treadmill in a secret lab, add some sweat, to simulate the real conditions and voila! You can, in a week or two get results that you should wait normally months or years for if paid athletes would wear them. Probably big companies dont wait for the market to bring the robots to them. Maybe they invested in secret research (because of the competition) long time ago and now have much more sophisticated robots to wear their shoes. Maybe they did the next step forward, and use them also in manufacturing. Maybe, in time, they got the robots to do more complex activites than walking and program them to wear the shoes in the same way a human would do. Maybe by now they imitate so well the human walk they could be, at times, indistinguishable from humans. Anyways, all must understand, in the future, in their quest for profit, the corporation would go fo the robots. But to make them acceptable for the public, they might very well campaing to promote them as usefull in many ways.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 16:56:03 +0000