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No big deal, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas can perform backflips now
- ttul 9y agoHow long before we see Atlas jumping from roof tops in Hong Kong?
- DKnoll 9y agoThe question is how long you live to te... LOST CARRIER
- muxator 9y agoIn the last animation the robot extends its legs after being already on the ground. Failing to see a physic justification for it, I wonder how much of these movements is the result of a predefined "script".
- agumonkey 9y agoto me it's more a bad anticipation of the landing leading to a bad response
- yodon 9y agoThe 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.
- wmf 9y agoYeah, here's the competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE Not even close.
- gowld 9y agoWhat'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.
- StavrosK 9y agoThe GP means "performing the flip in a pre-programmed manner", rather than dynamically reacting to actual sensor input. However, that strikes me much harder than actually doing it for real, which is still amazingly hard.
- braindongle 9y agoRegardless 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.
- jakelarkin 9y agoI 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?
- ajross 9y agoThe 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.
- FriedPickles 9y agoThere's one proven application of this technology: entertainment.
- krapp 9y ago> 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 Fluid motion without falling, along with a lot of physical activities, turn out to be very hard problems both for robotics and AI[0]. So yes, while the applications may not be as potentially far reaching as with machine learning, as a technological achievement getting a bipedal robot to do a backflip is more impressive. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- ajross 9y agoTrust me, I know. I was answering the question of why a solution to a very hard problem in one space sees pervasive application, and a similarly impressive solution in robotics gets no interest beyond backfliping robots on youtube.
- nether 9y agoScience has gone too far.
- krapp 9y agoWow. America's future murder machines really are getting spritely.
- tyingq 9y agoThe dog like one is more chilling to me. https://youtu.be/kgaO45SyaO4 https://youtu.be/kgaO45SyaO4
- neo4sure 9y agoWow awesome awesome. Why did Google sell this to softbank?
- nikanj 9y agoGoogle does not want to become an arms dealer
- joering2 9y agoLA 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.
- r00fus 9y agoLA city joins North Dakota and Connecticut states for the armed drones. It is truly horrifying.
- adventured 9y agoThe LA council did not just approve armed police drones. 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-commission-to-consider-letting-department-use-drones/ http://www.dailynews.com/2017/10/17/amid-protests-la-police-... https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/lapd-drones-set-to-be-deployed-by-los-angeles-police-department.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/lapd-drones-set-to-be-deploy...
- neo4sure 9y agoThis might be googles IBM moment.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoI 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.
- ggg9990 9y agoNo reason to, as they're targeting military applications. In fact the robots' super-strength may intimidate enemy soldiers into surrender.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoI 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.
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agoTo 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): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwpIQMUikU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwpIQMUikU
- viewtransform 9y agoDoes 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 ?
- santaclaus 9y agoWhy is the robot wearing Plimsolls? Compliance and/or friction at the contact surface?
- obilgic 9y agovideo paragraph gif sentence gif sentence gif
- zachsnow 9y agoIt'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?
- unixhero 9y agoSo you can watch it at work without "sitting down" and watching a video. And you also don't need a headset.
- mstade 9y agoAs a former gymnast I can confirm that is indeed a backflip. Pretty good one at that!
- nickm12 9y agoThese 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.
- visarga 9y agoThey should do it on stage.
- nopinsight 9y agoThis is a kind of AI/Robotics research that should be regulated. In 10-20 years, they will be quieter, cheaper, and even more capable. 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 9y ago> How much resistance do we have against a horde of robotic raptors carrying weapons? Atlas would suck against self-flying grenade-dropping drones.
- tfolbrecht 9y agoWhy 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
- lmilcin 9y agoIt's not the backflips that is fascinating to me. It's how human it looks.
- acjohnson55 9y agoFast forward to me being a minor pawn in the resistance, running through the woods from heavily armed Atlas droids.