4 ms·

In 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 mo

In 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 ago
to me it's more a bad anticipation of the landing leading to a bad response
yodon 9y ago
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.
- wmf 9y ago
  Yeah, here's the competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE Not even close.
gowld 9y ago
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.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  The 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 ago
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.

agumonkey 9y ago

to me it's more a bad anticipation of the landing leading to a bad response

yodon 9y ago

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.

wmf 9y ago
Yeah, here's the competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE Not even close.

gowld 9y ago

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.

StavrosK 9y ago
The 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 ago

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.