The biggest difference I'd make in constructing an android of this sort is more fundamental, I think:
I'd decentralize the brain.
Put the processing for grip and touch in the center of the hand. Put the processing that handles balance in each foot, and another processor near the center of gravity to handle the task of balancing the feet against each other. Then, when all the affordances of the body are able to take high-level commands and handle the details on their own, split the goal processing into 3 or 5 separate nodes and have them use a voting algorithm to give orders to the actual "tools" of the body. Then, even a catastrophic failure (say, losing a major chunk of the torso) can be recovered from, as long as at least one of the brains is still "alive."
The weak point at that point is your power source - the best bet is to look into ways to decentralize that as much as possible, too.
I'd probably use the wrist rather than the middle of the hand, just to make a delicate system a little less vulnerable, but I like the idea nonetheless.
As Evangelion taught us, power is always a problem with such things. I'd think two generators (of some sort) in the torso, upper and lower. Splitting it up would be difficult, as power sources tend to be a rather large part of any machine. Perhaps a third in the head to handle powering all of the sensory operations, but I couldn't really see having separate power sources in, for instance, each of the limbs.
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I'd decentralize the brain.
Put the processing for grip and touch in the center of the hand. Put the processing that handles balance in each foot, and another processor near the center of gravity to handle the task of balancing the feet against each other. Then, when all the affordances of the body are able to take high-level commands and handle the details on their own, split the goal processing into 3 or 5 separate nodes and have them use a voting algorithm to give orders to the actual "tools" of the body. Then, even a catastrophic failure (say, losing a major chunk of the torso) can be recovered from, as long as at least one of the brains is still "alive."
The weak point at that point is your power source - the best bet is to look into ways to decentralize that as much as possible, too.
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As Evangelion taught us, power is always a problem with such things.
I'd think two generators (of some sort) in the torso, upper and lower. Splitting it up would be difficult, as power sources tend to be a rather large part of any machine. Perhaps a third in the head to handle powering all of the sensory operations, but I couldn't really see having separate power sources in, for instance, each of the limbs.
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