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Atlas robot does parkour
- retSava 5y agoThis is the video with the blog post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk To me, I like to see when they stutter or slightly-fail, since that to indicates the dynamics and real-time part of the thing, that it is not a 100% scripted thing (although the blog post mentions the engineers fine-tuning the celebratory arm-pump, to what extent is that scripted then?)
- jcun4128 5y agoHa would be something to see it in Ninja Warrior show or something one day, needs hands.
- shadowgovt 5y agoIt's interesting to see how this has progressed from their video two years ago [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LikxFZZO2sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LikxFZZO2sk] and one year ago [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E]
- scythmic_waves 5y agoThat video is partly CGI, right? I can't find a smoking gun but it doesn't look entirely real.
- dane-pgp 5y agoAs one of the comments on the video says, that feeling is an example of the "uncanny mountain" effect.
- scythmic_waves 5y agoI'm not so sure. 1. [EDIT: IGNORE THIS POINT] They've done this before. [1] 2. To get more specific, look at the robot's legs around 0:09-0:16. They don't seem to be moving normally. I don't have professional video analysis chops, but I'd put some money on this being fake. Happy be to be proven wrong, though. EDIT: It appears I remembered this story incorrectly, and posted a link without reading it. I retract my first statement. I'll leave the link for posterity, though. [1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/6/17/18681682/boston-dynamics-robot-uprising-parody-video-cgi-fake https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/6/17/18681682/boston-dyna...
- ttmb 5y ago> 1. They've done this before. [1] Your link says nothing of the sort.
- mastax 5y agoThat CGI gag was done by Corridor Digital, not Boston Dynamics.
- ansible 5y agoThat's a great channel, I really like their "reacts" series that comes out every Saturday. They also had a good one from Sunday about the Pentagon UFO videos.
- mastax 5y agoHave you seen the behind the scenes video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk
- dane-pgp 5y agoThat provides some great context, but I couldn't help finding it a little unsettling at 03:09 when one of the robots is suspended off the ground and "bleeding" a pink fluid onto the mat beneath it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kingsloi 5y agoyeah definitely odd looking. I thought maybe just like 5k@60fps or something and my peasant eyes were just bad, but deffo odd looking
- KMnO4 5y agoMost likely it’s real. That said, we don’t know how many 10s-100s of takes this was done in. This single video could be the results of hundreds of hours of fine tuning parameters.
- electricwallaby 5y agoI noticed around the 50 second mark there is some fluid leaking out of the robots bum. Wonder what that could be?
- juancampa 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fluid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fluid
- levng 5y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk&feature=youtu.be This behind-the-scenes video says it is choreographed and scripted. It also contains instances where things go wrong as well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 5y agoAnyone else thinks the video looks a lot like CGI? Nice job, nonetheless.
- scythmic_waves 5y agoI also think that. But it appears we're both being downvoted for saying so. I'm not sure I understand why? HN is usually pretty tolerant of healthy skepticism. And it's not as if we're saying "this feat is impossible, Boston Dynamics must be lying". We are (or at least I am) saying "the thing I'm looking at doesn't look real".
- thisisbrians 5y agoIt looked fake to me immediately. Maybe just uncanny valley since the movements are not very human-like — I'm not sure. But the lighting on the machines looks all wrong to me (although the shadows do look accurate, and the audio also seems convincing).
- moralestapia 5y agoYeah, the lightning seems weird for me as well, and some movements look kind of blurry. Who knows.
- delgaudm 5y agoI'm not a particularly pessimistic person in general, but I don't know ...this tech, while cool, feels like the precursor to a worse future in general. Maybe I've seen too much sci-fi, but these robots look like optimizing for future soldiers, law enforcement etc. Given all the other Self-Driving / Facial Recognition / Loss of Privacy / Deepfake / "AI is bad at recognizing $situation"-type posts, and as all these techs converge I just feel melancholy, not optimistic. I feel like "AI Robot cops show implicit bias resulting in 3 deaths" or "Robot Cop shoots innocent person after facial recognition goes bad" or "Crowd Control Bots kill 55 at peaceful protest" - type headlines are the future here.
- handrous 5y agoI think the developed world's headed nigh-inevitably toward something more closely resembling the Chinese model of government—maybe not with autocratic leadership, but with similar levels of centralized surveillance and such, extensive Internet filtering and blocking, and yeah, probably a lot more robots in law enforcement (military? Definitely yes in China if it makes cost/benefit sense, and maybe in the West whether it does or not—yes in either case for flying drones, that's already well underway) I think we'll find states that fail to do that, suffer. The other way out is rejection of technology to a large extent, but I doubt many will try that model as it'd cause a large & swift hit to quality of life. (why, yes, I do have a fairly large technological-determinism and social-groups-experience-evolution-like-anything-else-does streak, why do you ask?)
- CryptoPunk 5y agoStates that don't implement those forms of totalitarian surveillance/control will not suffer. They will be far more stable, with a less concentrated distribution of power and thus less economic resources wasted through rent-seeking. Centralization of power invites corruption and leads to social fragility.
- frozenport 5y agofirefighters, nurses, construction workers
- gcheong 5y agoCertainly impressive. I almost get the sense that these robots would be bored out of their minds working in an Amazon fulfillment center.
- lanerobertlane 5y agoThat's why they sell them to the police and military and put guns in their hands instead.
- rasz 5y agoWhole point of a machine is it doesnt get bored.
- sparrish 5y agoStrangely portions look like stop-motion with the stuttering.
- prepend 5y agoWhat can I do to defend myself against killer robots? Seriously, is there something simple that I can put in my glovebox of my car to use in case these robots start getting scary? Is there a simple household good that will work well against these, until they start explicitly shielding against stuff?
- tyingq 5y agoSpray can of sticky expanding foam for the various sensors? Edit: Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es2rVHLKS3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es2rVHLKS3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVy5Vm43X_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVy5Vm43X_A There's also bulk rodent glue, if you could figure out how to shoot it :) https://www.domyown.com/catchmaster-bulk-glue-can-p-15693.html https://www.domyown.com/catchmaster-bulk-glue-can-p-15693.ht...
- hmottestad 5y agoPaint ought to do it. Chuck a bucket of paint at one of these and the sensors will be knocked out instantly.
- prepend 5y agoIt’s kind of hard to fling paint, but I guess just making a potato gun that spits out paint should be good. I’ll be looking for some Holi festival type gear.
- freediver 5y agoWhat makes this really interesting is that all this is achieved with very little or no "AI" (in the context of current machine learning approaches). Purely heuristics based approach to something as complex.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoThere is weired tendency to use AI for well-understood problems that have formulas and solutions.
- habitue 5y agoRight, but is parkour a well-understood problem with formulas and solutions? I think there's also a tendency to go "You just need linear regression" a lot when actually, well, there is a reason people are excited about new AI techniques: they make things that were very difficult much easier, and they make some things possible that never were before. Is deep learning / reinforcement learning actually useful here? Maybe. I would be surprised if Boston Dynamics wasn't at least looking into it.
- gsibble 5y agoI just tried raising money. Mentioning ML makes investors immediately want to throw in. So hot right now.
- candiodari 5y agoWell. yes. Using AI means you learn one theory, and now you can do voice recognition, chess and parkour with state of the art performance (except perhaps when it comes to minimising compute) ... And then there's where it takes off. There isn't a single human that can come anywhere close to the language knowledge base AI algorithms can build up. Even a team of 100 humans would not have the breadth of languages algorithms have these days. Yes, context understanding humans still have the edge, but it's shrinking every day. But so many language aspects, from translation to grammar, machines outperform all but the very best humans, and 99.9% of all humans even within one language.
- auxym 5y ago
- trenning 5y agoCan we brainstorm how you would compromise one of these robots? I don't think I've seen discussion about how you would stop one in an adverse situation. Hogtie cowboy style? Taser? Paint splashed over sensors?
- jjkaczor 5y agoPeople are begining to post some things: https://twitter.com/LenKusov/status/1364640007101775872 https://twitter.com/LenKusov/status/1364640007101775872
- prepend 5y agoFunny, I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking some high strength fishing line fashioned into a bolo sling would be cheap. Or maybe just some “invisibility cloak” made out of astronaut blankets.
- kipchak 5y agoI would figure conventional firearms would do the job pretty well depending on the round. That being said I could well see "anti robot" rounds becoming a thing similar to "zombie" stuff a few years ago.
- bserge 5y agoBullets, lasers, paint, bricks, rope, pipes, anything that works on a human and more. Doesn't seem particularly hard if they're in range. Now if they're sniping you from a mile away, that's a bit worse.
- ansible 5y ago> Now if they're sniping you from a mile away, that's a bit worse. Humans snipers regularly make kills at that distance or farther, so that's not really a new threat. I'd be more worried about the development of supersonic AGMs that are smaller and cheaper. Right now, it doesn't make much economic sense to fire a $10K USD missile to kill random people (though the USA does it anyway), but if it only costs $1K... now you're starting to get to WMD levels of murder.
- Amin699 5y agoThe robot did pump its arm, but it also stumbled a bit on this simple move. It was just the slightest stutter step, something most people watching the video would never notice. But the Atlas team notices every detail and they want to get it right. “We hadn’t run that behavior after the backflip before today, so that was really an experiment,” says Scott Kuindersma, the Atlas team lead at Boston Dynamics. “If you watch the video closely, it looks a little awkward. We’re going to swap in a behavior we’ve tested before so we have some confidence it will work.”
- jacksonkmarley 5y agoThe thing that looks weird imo is when the robots are running on flat ground, something looks off about their feet. Can't tell what it is but they look like they're floating. Anyway it's pretty amazing, and interesting to see the improvements over the years in how the robots move. And clearly the two robots should fight.
- mrfusion 5y agoAgreed! Floating is the right description. See my other comment. I’m thinking the other foot is still in contact with the ground and supporting the floating foot?
- jvanderbot 5y agoThis is awesome, but until someone solves the real-time sensing and modelling problem, it'll never fly in the real world. The use case is still warehouses. Here's my logic / assumptions: How does the robot "know" (have sufficient model information to predict the response) that the board will hold it when it does a vault? It doesn't -- it is told to vault by placing one limb on top. As we've seen with self-driving cars, where the sensing is 99% of the problem, that's the barrier between a closed set and the real world. Don't get me wrong. The fact that Atlas / Boston Dynamics is in a state where the sensing is _mostly_ what remains a problem is astounding.
- qiqing 5y agoWouldn't it be great, though, if humans were no longer working warehouse jobs that strain their backs and their bladders?
- jvanderbot 5y agoYes! Your warehouse would have to be a cleanroom (someone left a can of soda? Your robot just smashed through a shelf when it tried to step on it) In general, I'm an AI researcher and an AI skeptic. After 10 years in robotics, I'm learning that the Human Is Cheaper and where Human Is Expensive, we prefer toasters, not terminators. (just enough hard-coded / hard-wired adaptivity to get by with tons of supervision)
- ryankrage77 5y ago> Your warehouse would have to be a cleanroom At which point you're back to an automated assembly line which needs very little dynamics or intelligence. The whole point of developing such advanced robots is so that you don't need to worry as much about that can on the floor.
- rebuilder 5y agoDepends on who profits.
- konart 5y ago
- WalterSobchak 5y agoSide note, I am surprised bostondynamics.com does not enforce a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. https://blog.bostondynamics.com/atlas-leaps-bounds-and-backflips https://blog.bostondynamics.com/atlas-leaps-bounds-and-backf...
- cs702 5y agoAn impressive accomplishment -- and beautiful in its own way. Alas, I can't help but keep imagining a Terminator climbing and jumping over barriers, instead of those smaller, less-threatening robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXl_XKXZAI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXl_XKXZAI I'm rather surprised no one else has mentioned James Cameron's robot-from-the-future nightmare so far.
- johnnyb9 5y agoI can't help but listen to the terminator theme song in my head while watching these ala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCeb5DfENaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCeb5DfENaY
- newaccount2021 5y agoThe middlebrow dismissal in this thread is galling. This is AMAZING. Just like everything else Boston Dynamics does...and all HN has to offer is weird musings on Terminators. You know, its okay to spend your days knocking out three-line Python PRs and still be wowed by people working at a much higher level...
- mrfusion 5y agoAny ideas why the physics looks slightly off like gravity is slightly too slow? Maybe it’s slow motion or sped up? Or I’m wondering if it looks like both feet are off the ground when really only one is and supported by the other?
- thisisbrians 5y agoI thought the video was fake. It doesn't look right to me, but maybe that's just uncanny valley?
- ryankrage77 5y agoI think it's just that the robots are very heavy?
- implements 5y agoThat’s cool and all, but how long before they can manage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx-vUsShk9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx-vUsShk9U (Robot fight in “Outside the Wire”).
- rasz 5y agoRobotic platforms would not miss as much as in the movie, but a 5 second gunfight scene wouldnt be fun to watch.
- only_as_i_fall 5y agoAre these incredibly expensive or have a regulatory hurdle or something? I feel like we've been seeing increasingly sophisticated demos like this for over a decade now and yet nothing has really made it to market that I can tell. Maybe there just literally aren't many good use cases for the types of robots made by Boston dynamics?
- the-pigeon 5y agoNo. But it's just a demo. In perfect conditions if you run it 100 times this is the result. In the real world they have no application as they fail pretty much always in real conditions. But this is research, pushing things in controlled conditions help you learn what you can do in less controlled conditions. Though sometimes it's just a deadend. The exact same thing is true of YouTuber stunt videos. Any very impressive stunt was failed hundreds of times but they show you the footage where they pulled it off. The thing to remember is that media is largely fake or deceiving, presenting the very best and not the reality.
- machiaweliczny 5y agoAlso battery tech needs to improve for practical usage
- jpindar 5y agoI believe the four legged Spot robots are for sale, but I haven't heard of anyone actually buying them. They do have support pages and user manuals online. https://support.bostondynamics.com/s/ https://support.bostondynamics.com/s/
- noelsusman 5y agoThey're currently selling the dog robot for $75k. You can see what their current customers are doing here: https://www.bostondynamics.com/resources/case-studies https://www.bostondynamics.com/resources/case-studies
- rglover 5y agoProgress on our dystopian hell seems to be moving right along.
- rkagerer 5y agoWhat's that dripping from the right robot's right thigh near the end? https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk?t=49 https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk?t=49 Also are the layers of foam over the landing surfaces they backflip onto needed for dampening?
- nofunsir 5y agoSweat, clearly. Hardcore parkour’s not easy.
- nemothekid 5y agoThe robots are powered by hydraulics. Might be a leak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EezdinoG4mk
- tantalor 5y agoSir, are you aware that you are leaking coolant at an alarming rate? https://youtu.be/z7U3x3uRmi8?t=57 https://youtu.be/z7U3x3uRmi8?t=57
- taytus 5y agoIs bostondynamics making more money from youtube ad revenue than from their robots?
- stakkur 5y ago”If robots can eventually respond to their environments with the same level of dexterity as the average adult human, the range of potential applications will be practically limitless. ‘Humanoids are interesting from a couple perspectives,’ Kuindersma says. “First, they capture our vision of a go-anywhere, do-anything robot of the future. They may not be the best design for any particular task, but if you wanted to build one platform that could perform a wide variety of physical tasks, we already know that a human form factor is capable of doing that.” No, they’re not “humanoids”, and it’s chilling to hear them call it that. But more simply than that: this will be used for war and human surveillance and response. It is already underway. TL;DR: Why?
- rglover 5y agoBecause. Why allow "useless eaters" to roam the planet, dealing with them coughing on your parfait when you can have one of these sanitary machines do it? And of course, when we tell the parfait makers that they're out of a job, they'll freak...now we have the perfect, emotionless authority to keep them in line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU&t=14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU&t=14s
- tempestn 5y agoWebster uses humanoid robots as an example usage of 'humanoid'. The word just means it has a human-like shape, ie. two arms and two legs connected to a torso. Definition of humanoid (Entry 1 of 2) : having human form or characteristics // humanoid dentition // humanoid robots https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanoid https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanoid
- blackoil 5y agoIs humanoid form factor really best compared to mountain goat / spider? or some other factor is helping decide the choice?
- UnFleshedOne 5y agoI think the main reason for making a humanoid and human-sized robots is that all infrastructure is made for humans. So keeping a similar form factor is an advantage if you expect it to work in human spaces.
- Kye 5y agoThere was a time when I would have been excited to hear about a real life parkour robot.
- smikhanov 5y agoHonest question: if Boston Dynamics robots are so good, why we never see any news of them cleaning up toxic debris, working in an area of armed conflict, or rescuing people from fires?
- rtkwe 5y agoThey're good at certain things like movement but task planning and execution are still under development. You could maybe use the current version to explore burning buildings but they wouldn't be able to do much more than that, you don't see these lifting shifting loads or dragging things ever which is the kind of things they'd need to do for the toxic cleanup or fire rescue tasks. For the war fighting it's pretty much always more effective to use things like tanks or drones rather than dealing with walking motions, that's still pretty inefficient.
- tempestn 5y agoNote that parent said working in conflict areas, not necessarily fighting. I can imagine various jobs where this form factor might be useful. Clearing rubble for instance, or dealing with mines or other explosives. Each individual task might be better handled by something purpose-built, but a humanoid robot could be more versatile.
- rtkwe 5y agoMostly only when dealing with tools designed for humans, you can generally design the same tools to be more efficient on a general platform base. And even if you do use them you run into similar problems with task planning and execution. Finally there's power issues with the humanoid shaped bots both in the strength of the actuators (it's hard to have both really strong, fast and precise all in a package that fits) and in providing power to the robot itself. The latter has been the death of many a walking bot intended for the military, batteries don't last long enough and gas power plants are loud and generally bulky.
- tempestn 5y agoThe current robots are a research platform, not a commercial product. The idea is that eventually it would be able to do things like that and many more, but currently huge amounts of choreography and testing are required to produce videos like this one. They've come a long way, but they've still got a long way to go before they could go into an uncontrolled situation and perform usefully, let alone with the level of aptitude apparent here.
- swayvil 5y agoThe "cha-ching" is a placeholder for "strafe the rioters". Too cynical?
- UnFleshedOne 5y agoMuch easier (and already being done) with drones.
- swayvil 5y agoWhat would these legged, ground-traversing robots be better at than the flying variety? Sweeping tunnels? Construction?
- UnFleshedOne 5y agoI guess anything involving lifting, manipulation and narrow places.
- swayvil 5y agoSex. Definitely sex
- seriousquestion 5y agoIs Boston Dynamics primarily a viral video company? If not, why do they keep getting bought and sold?
- she11c0de 5y agoI wonder if it would be possible to setup a multi-agent reinforcement learning scenario where a few of those play tag over a complex terrain.
- rasz 5y agoThey would probably need 10x the technical woman power to keep them operational for longer than 10 minute stretches. The second article about the challenges articulates pretty well they are in the crawling stage of locomotion, constantly discovering and improving on hardware bottlenecks and weak points.
- dexterhaslem 5y agoyak shaving a fist pump, awesome
- jcuenod 5y agoThe video I wanted to see (the two robots actually doing their thing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk
- lawrenceyan 5y agoWould it be incorrect to say that the primary problems Boston Dynamics works on, which is planning and controls, is already mostly a solved problem? My understanding is that the majority of research was completed within the past few decades, in comparison to the relative nascency of modern deep learning techniques.
- rm445 5y agoThe foundations are understood, in a 'chemistry is just the Schrödinger equation' kind of way. Any amount of research and engineering is still needed to make machines which can move themselves effectively, be energy-efficient, and interact with the messy and unstructured wider world.
- lawrenceyan 5y agoHow far off would you estimate a company like Boston Dynamics is from production then? (Say with existing levels of industrialization in the form of non-humanoid robots already commonly used as a benchmark/baseline)
- rm445 5y agoMy guess (as an engineer but not in that field) is that some sort of breakthrough is needed or it will be a long slog. The general problem of robots navigating arbitrary spaces will probably be solved by wider advances in machine learning. Because a robot mapping its environment, planning its motion, and carrying out that motion while adapting to the dynamic environment, isn't being treated as a classic control systems problem any more, but fed into trained nets. It's too broad a problem for even sophisticated control systems, in the general case. Even once robots can do amazing things, there needs to be an economic use case that's compatible with what they can do, how they're powered, and how long they can work for. Similar to quadcopters in a way - they have changed the world in some limited ways, but so far they haven't scaled up to carry people or out to deliver parcels, so they remain niche. If someone figures out one day that robots can deliver burritos/assassinate dissidents/stack shelves efficiently, it could be a quick takeoff.