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Honest 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 res

Honest 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 ago
They'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 ago
  Note 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 ago
    Mostly 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 ago
The 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.

Honest 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 ago

They'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 ago
Note 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 ago
  Mostly 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 ago

The 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.