There's a practical aspect to it, which I assume was intentional given the engineering challenge of being able to fully rotate torso like that, etc.
Most of these humanoid robots (e.g. TeslaBot in it's current state) walk slowly, which limits productivity. It wouldn't matter if the job was standing at an assembly station, but anything with legs is obviously targetting more general use cases such as "gofer" - fetching parts from bins, etc.
The benefit of electro-Atlas (they should have a naming competition!) is that it can essentially move or look in any direction, which means it has to walk/turn much less to get into a preferred orientation or move to a target location. It's a bit like the early "micromouse" competition entrants where they went from the initial car-like designs to omnidirectional ones (using omnidirectional wheels) so that they could change direction without needing to turn - just scoot off at 90 degrees to previous direction.
I commented to this effect on a previous post: I find that the old Atlas leaned much more into the uncanny valley because it was sort of human-like in its movement. This one has some horror movie robot vibes going, but not the uncanny valley effect (not for me anyway).
I wonder if it has to do with the fact that they so front-and-center showcased the very un-human-like capabilities, whereas the other one almost seemed to try to just be an exceptionally athletic human.
HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago
Most of these humanoid robots (e.g. TeslaBot in it's current state) walk slowly, which limits productivity. It wouldn't matter if the job was standing at an assembly station, but anything with legs is obviously targetting more general use cases such as "gofer" - fetching parts from bins, etc.
The benefit of electro-Atlas (they should have a naming competition!) is that it can essentially move or look in any direction, which means it has to walk/turn much less to get into a preferred orientation or move to a target location. It's a bit like the early "micromouse" competition entrants where they went from the initial car-like designs to omnidirectional ones (using omnidirectional wheels) so that they could change direction without needing to turn - just scoot off at 90 degrees to previous direction.
pdpi|1 year ago
ChicagoBoy11|1 year ago
consumer451|1 year ago