Why are so many users in the comments on here fear mongering? Don't you understand we already have dumb solutions for killing and making war? Bombs, bullets, Chemical and biological weapons, non of which need a complex robotic platform. How will human shaped robots change anything when we can build flying, hovering grenades and mass deploy them with COTS components?
You know what does need a complex platform like Atlas? Disaster Rescue, Medicine, Telepresence, Automation etc
To get an idea of progress, here's state of the art 10 years ago. Note that the actuators are pneumatic pistons, not direct drive motors (very hard to control, springy like muscles):
Does anyone know what breakthroughs in control systems have gone into making this possible ?
Are there any papers describing how Boston Dynamics is programming this ? are they hardcoding the backflip from human data and then overlaying some stability code ? or is the backflip entirely generated by the underlying controls ?
I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics, and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up. The technology certainly looks amazing. Are the commercialization prospects really that bad?
I think Boston Dynamics is more of a huge practical research project that won't have commercialization results for at least 10 years (random number I generated on intuition), whereas companies like Google are committed to justifying their efforts on quarter-by-quarter basis.
If a company owns Boston Dynamics and has one bad quarter, you have to trim the fat or deal with the bloodbath of angry impatient investors
EDIT: That being said, companies like Boston Dynamics are, in my opinion, Star Trek tier, and, as a tangent, is a perfect example of why we need to eventually live in a world that doesn't thrive on currency profit
The video is amazing, but let's be honest: fluid motion without falling is something you can expect from a minimum wage employee. And big robots are physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain.
This is a different world from, say, machine learning. It's equally true that we're just now reaching the point where ML is as good as we are at recognizing photos of our children or transcribing our voice mail. But those ML algorithms can be deployed at cloud scale for pennies, so it's worthwhile where physical things aren't yet.
I heard somewhere that the military wants to love these robots, particularly for hauling stuff into unfriendly terrain, but the main reason they simply aren’t viable is that they are much, much too loud. There were other problems too, complex maintenance in the field and the likes, but apparently that is less of a hassle than getting ambushed because the enemy heard you coming a mile away...
Don't be evil? Kind of hard to build robots to help kill people and spruik this motto at the same time. I don't buy the money pit argument, rarely been Google's sole yardstick.
Kicker is in the US, government funded research is primarily through defense spending. If you're going to turn your nose up at that, you're on a long expensive path to monetisation in this space.
It's a money pit, albeit a cool one. But that doesn't matter. Ruthless doesn't see the coolness, just the dollar signs.
> and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up
See "money pit." Defense manufacturers are all about how to extract money from the government, and this doesn't do that for at least 10 more years. Transportation is already a cut-throat industry built around fees and doublespeak, so... no joy there either.
Boston Dynamics needs a R&D friendly rich company to leech off while doing their work, which could cost upward of a billion dollars over the next five years. Softbank, from what I can tell, is pretty much exactly that - they're willing to invest in Uber for goodness sake...
The Boston Dynamics robot is extending its legs to return to both a fully stable state and its optimal “home” or resting position state.
As to the question of whether the robot is following a ‘predefined “script”’ (implying, I think, that the developers might have “cheated”) if it were easy to make a “predefined script” that let a robot do this kind of thing, it would have been done years ago. Stability of complex dynamical systems is an incredibly hard problem, and without real active stability control there’s no way to get a thousand pound robot to balance like this. There’s no cheating involved, they simply did the hard things and made them look easy.
What's the physics justification for doing a backflip? Obviously it's scripted, the same way a gymnast's tumble is scripted. The robot isn't sentiently deciding that it wants to do some flips today. The interesting part is that it is capable of doing the flip.
Regardless of where we are on the continuum between "move this actuator to this position now (1980s)" and "go jump onto each of those boxes and do a flip off the last one (2030?)", this is damn impressive.
I wonder if they’ll start to model the robots “strength” after ratios found in humans. I thought its movement was squarely in the uncanny valley, at least partly because its muscle were probably way stronger than what a human could do.
I wonder. Combining strength, speed, precision, and range of motion in a small package can be tricky, and requires trade-offs. It may be no stronger than it needs to be to perform the motions we're seeing.
It's a multi-paragraph description of a video that takes longer (and is far more boring) to read than watch. And there are choppy gifs illustrating the paragraphs narrating the video.
I don't understand why this is being done. Presumably it increases engagement?
These videos are always mindblowing to me, but I rarely see anyone ask "how many failures did it take to make the video?" There's a huge difference between this being a 99% performance and a 1% performance.
LA council just passed approval for armed police drones. When I look at Atlas, I'm prod how far technology is coming and I am not afraid of this machine; but I am afraid of what our government will eventually do with them.
[+] [-] tfolbrecht|8 years ago|reply
You know what does need a complex platform like Atlas? Disaster Rescue, Medicine, Telepresence, Automation etc
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwpIQMUikU
[+] [-] viewtransform|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] santaclaus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakelarkin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|8 years ago|reply
If a company owns Boston Dynamics and has one bad quarter, you have to trim the fat or deal with the bloodbath of angry impatient investors
EDIT: That being said, companies like Boston Dynamics are, in my opinion, Star Trek tier, and, as a tangent, is a perfect example of why we need to eventually live in a world that doesn't thrive on currency profit
[+] [-] ajross|8 years ago|reply
This is a different world from, say, machine learning. It's equally true that we're just now reaching the point where ML is as good as we are at recognizing photos of our children or transcribing our voice mail. But those ML algorithms can be deployed at cloud scale for pennies, so it's worthwhile where physical things aren't yet.
[+] [-] mstade|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geojim|8 years ago|reply
Kicker is in the US, government funded research is primarily through defense spending. If you're going to turn your nose up at that, you're on a long expensive path to monetisation in this space.
[+] [-] awalton|8 years ago|reply
It's a money pit, albeit a cool one. But that doesn't matter. Ruthless doesn't see the coolness, just the dollar signs.
> and no other transportation or defense manufacturer scooped them up
See "money pit." Defense manufacturers are all about how to extract money from the government, and this doesn't do that for at least 10 more years. Transportation is already a cut-throat industry built around fees and doublespeak, so... no joy there either.
Boston Dynamics needs a R&D friendly rich company to leech off while doing their work, which could cost upward of a billion dollars over the next five years. Softbank, from what I can tell, is pretty much exactly that - they're willing to invest in Uber for goodness sake...
[+] [-] 0xbear|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mstade|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muxator|8 years ago|reply
Failing to see a physic justification for it, I wonder how much of these movements is the result of a predefined "script".
[+] [-] yodon|8 years ago|reply
As to the question of whether the robot is following a ‘predefined “script”’ (implying, I think, that the developers might have “cheated”) if it were easy to make a “predefined script” that let a robot do this kind of thing, it would have been done years ago. Stability of complex dynamical systems is an incredibly hard problem, and without real active stability control there’s no way to get a thousand pound robot to balance like this. There’s no cheating involved, they simply did the hard things and made them look easy.
[+] [-] gowld|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] braindongle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nopinsight|8 years ago|reply
How much resistance do we have against a horde of robotic raptors carrying weapons?
If you disagree, please state why instead of downvoting silently because this is a serious issue and we ought to have rational discussions about it.
[+] [-] joaomacp|8 years ago|reply
Atlas would suck against self-flying grenade-dropping drones.
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggg9990|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmilcin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|8 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/kgaO45SyaO4
[+] [-] obilgic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zachsnow|8 years ago|reply
I don't understand why this is being done. Presumably it increases engagement?
[+] [-] ttul|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DKnoll|8 years ago|reply
LOST CARRIER
[+] [-] nickm12|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neo4sure|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikanj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nether|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neo4sure|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
They're approved strictly for surveillance purposes. It specifically forbids any weapons capability.
"A drone would not be used with any weapons capabilities, including any non-lethal or less-than-lethal systems, according to the proposed guidelines."
http://www.dailynews.com/2017/10/17/amid-protests-la-police-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/lapd-drones-set-to-be-deploy...
[+] [-] r00fus|8 years ago|reply
It is truly horrifying.