Thank You!

Thank you all for the encouragement over the last few months as I've worked on Toyota's Ideas for Good challenge.  All my ideas have now been submitted for the judges (and world) to see.  And thank you for your patience with all the recent posts as the final deadline loomsed.  Hopefully you all took away some good ideas yourselves and created some intriguing submissions as well.

There is one last idea that came up during my final push that I didn't get a chance to blog about, but feel free to take inspiration yourself from it as you finish the race yourselves:

• Walking on Robotic Legs: Walking is a difficult task for robots and artificial limbs to perform.  The movements of over 200 tendons, muscles and ligaments in the leg and foot, as well as the upper body muscles that maintain balance, are too big to recreate with current technology.   So we need to reduce the number of components to a level that can be manufactured within the size of a normal human leg.  THUMS can help by randomly and selectively eliminating certain real muscles in simulations and testing the result on walking stability.  THUMS can also show only the muscles used in a potential artificial limb design and compare the result to actual THUMS simulation runs.  All will lead to better robotic limbs for people relying on prosthetics due to injury.

So thank you once again for the encouragement and I hope your submissions have benefited from my work here on the blog.  Now we just wait for the results.  May the best ideas win!