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It's strange how these Boston Dynamics videos were already going "viral" almost 20 years ago when I was in school. [quod pod/dog walking terrain outside] Back

It's strange how these Boston Dynamics videos were already going "viral" almost 20 years ago when I was in school. [quod pod/dog walking terrain outside] Back then, you also thought practical robotics would be almost there. Really makes you think about today's videos, and whether it's just hype all over again. If you have the data/background, feel free to expand how these demos are different from back then in relation to robotics becoming actually deployable in real arbitrary environments.

micromacrofoot 2y ago
they do actually have deployed big dogs in certain industrial settings, and have for a few years at least, though I'm not sure what the bar for success is
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Also on the battlefield: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/08/16/what-we-know-about-ukraines-army-of-robot-dogs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/08/16/what-w...
cubefox 2y ago
This one is far better than the robots they had back then. Which, moreover, weren't using machine learning for control but handcrafted algorithms, which don't have the potential to scale as far as machine learning. The robot in the current video was explicitly trained with reinforcement learning.
amelius 2y ago
Well, if they released them on the streets, there would be a revolt. I personally think I'd grab my baseball bat.
- jajko 2y ago
  Butlerian jihad all over again
  - amelius 2y ago
    There is only a brief window of time when we can say no to these things.
thunky 2y ago
> Really makes you think about today's videos, and whether it's just hype all over again. That's my gut reaction when I see these announcements. That, and that I don't want a robot that can do cartwheels, because cartwheels don't wash dishes or mow the lawn. I don't see why they aren't focusing on demonstrating practical tasks.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I suspect because we're way past robots doing practical tasks. Your comment is kind of funny in a way — like telling someone in the demo-scene to just write a spreadsheet already.
  - matsemann 2y ago
    Or it's the opposite? Mundane tasks we want automated requires a dexterity most robots don't have (at least without being painfully slow).
    - Symmetry 2y ago
      When a robot is moving itself it has a very good idea of what each part of itself weighs, how big it is, and has sensors to tell it what angle all its joints are at. These are all much more difficult with an object the robot is holding in its hand. But you can still find videos of Atlas doing practical tasks, just not as impressively as it jumps around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IPm7f1vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IPm7f1vI A mentor of mine in robotics talks about how the people at his research group would watch a video from an old Julia Childs TV show of her chopping vegetables and doing other cooking tasks and they would try to figure out how long until a robot could do those things.
      - thunky 2y ago
        This spasm would have ruined my dishes: https://youtu.be/F_7IPm7f1vI?t=80 https://youtu.be/F_7IPm7f1vI?t=80
    - 2y ago
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I was thinking the opposite. I was thinking (after seeing another company selling a pop-up button for $8) that here is a company that is actually making shit — and constantly (perhaps slowly) making it better. From dog to human. And, as I understand it, from hydraulic to electric. Looking in particular at video #3, I get a sense that there has had to be a lot of very expensive iteration to get to something that has nearly exactly the degree of motion of a human. Maybe the problem with the videos is that we have come to expect this as "normal" and no longer viral. Now, that's kind of a wild thought. But to your question about when they will be deployable — I would hazard to guess that cost is the issue. If these came down a few orders of magnitude in cost I suspect we will start seeing them deployed.
- whizzter 2y ago
  And that's the part that makes me wonder if BD will ever "make it", starting 20 years ago they probably had to make quite specialized algorithms with a ton of hardcoding to make their robots work (and it was impressive then). Just starting 15, 10 or even 5 years ago neural networks have been acing these kinds of "balancing" problems in other areas but with an entirely different architecture. In 2025 with the rapid expansion of other "AI" fields, I would expect a robot to weld a scaffold from loose parts and THEN cartwheel off it, go to a human handler and pick up an rifle and then hit a target 100 meters away (or similarly "different" task from the welding to show versatility).
mapt 2y ago
Those quad dogs are delivering rations and ammo to Ukrainian trenchlines. There was talk about them being employed even further forward a few times, but I think aerial drones are a lot less complicated & expensive to build, harder to shoot, and most importantly easier to maintain a long-distance wireless connection to.
- demaga 2y ago
  Or wired connection. There are drones that use fiber to resist to electronic attacks. Of course, it's basically for suicide missions only where you fly directly into deep enemy-controlled territory.
- Lanolderen 2y ago
  That's inline with my impressions in general. Dogs, humanoids can better interact with the environment but even back in the day the Boston Dynamics dog marketing was to a large extent automated infrastructure monitoring with things like thermal cams and less so the actual intervention which means you can just get drones with thermal cameras and skip the whole walking issue/cost. On the other side if you need interaction you can just get an arm. My current employer is looking at the humanoid robots more so for the marketing that they can do things "magically"/without careful preprogramming and adapting to conditions but if you can do that with a humanoid, you can do it with an arm for cheaper still. The space where you need monitoring, interaction and movement to me seems very limited and even undesired. There's a reason we avoid having people do the entire process from start to finish and like putting them in as short as possible loops..
sveme 2y ago
For me, the problem is that while I find these videos extremely fascinating, I'm missing the whole interaction part - it is unclear to me how much of these movements are preprogrammed and how far away the engineers are from having these robots being able to respond to complex requests. This mapping from human language to motor action needs to be the next step (something that Nvidia is working towards).
thomassmith65 2y ago
It's robotics, which is an actually difficult technology. What Boston Dynamics has achieved in the past two decades is impressive. It took decades for computers, after they appeared in government projects, to become ubiquitous. There were many problems to solve. In our era, we're just used to average companies hyping up piddling, niche products by calling them new technologies. Sure, if the 'technology' is an electric juicebag squeezer or something, someone can get it from research to market within a year. All that is aside from whether it's a good idea to thrust robots into the world as quickly as possible. Between robots and AI, we could lose a billion jobs in a short time period.
intrasight 2y ago
Their videos were a hit 42 years ago when I was in school. Of course back then Atlas's great, great, great grandfather could only hop in a circle with a center tether. So when you see the full history, you realize the progress has been fucking amazing.
marcusverus 2y ago
I remember thinking that the humanoid robotics revolution was imminent after seeing ASIMO walk around 2010[0], but after observing the slapstick comedy that was the DARPA Robotics Challenge around 2015[1], it seemed that we had actually made zero progress. But I haven't felt that way in years! My feeling at this point is that the best humanoid robots have, from a hardware perspective, surpassed the "minimally viable product" threshold. By this I mean that they are physically capable of completing enough tasks that would make them worthwhile a worthwhile product. They are physically capable of walking the dog, folding the laundry, picking up the living room, bringing in the groceries, etc. It's possible that there are reliability issues to address, but given that the newest generation of bots are fully electric, it's hard to imagine that this is a more difficult problem than those they've already solved. At this point, we're just waiting on the software to catch up. And surely this problem seems far more doable today than it did 20 years ago, given all the progress we've made in machine vision and machine learning! We'll know that the robotics revolution is truly imminent when the big players start pouring capital into development. Tesla has already joined the fray. I expect more will follow in the next few years. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0xLVCb-OA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0xLVCb-OA [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo

micromacrofoot 2y ago

they do actually have deployed big dogs in certain industrial settings, and have for a few years at least, though I'm not sure what the bar for success is

geerlingguy 2y ago
Also on the battlefield: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/08/16/what-we-know-about-ukraines-army-of-robot-dogs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/08/16/what-w...

cubefox 2y ago

This one is far better than the robots they had back then. Which, moreover, weren't using machine learning for control but handcrafted algorithms, which don't have the potential to scale as far as machine learning. The robot in the current video was explicitly trained with reinforcement learning.

amelius 2y ago

Well, if they released them on the streets, there would be a revolt. I personally think I'd grab my baseball bat.

jajko 2y ago
Butlerian jihad all over again
- amelius 2y ago
  There is only a brief window of time when we can say no to these things.

thunky 2y ago

> Really makes you think about today's videos, and whether it's just hype all over again. That's my gut reaction when I see these announcements. That, and that I don't want a robot that can do cartwheels, because cartwheels don't wash dishes or mow the lawn. I don't see why they aren't focusing on demonstrating practical tasks.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
I suspect because we're way past robots doing practical tasks. Your comment is kind of funny in a way — like telling someone in the demo-scene to just write a spreadsheet already.
- matsemann 2y ago
  Or it's the opposite? Mundane tasks we want automated requires a dexterity most robots don't have (at least without being painfully slow).
  - Symmetry 2y ago
    When a robot is moving itself it has a very good idea of what each part of itself weighs, how big it is, and has sensors to tell it what angle all its joints are at. These are all much more difficult with an object the robot is holding in its hand. But you can still find videos of Atlas doing practical tasks, just not as impressively as it jumps around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IPm7f1vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_7IPm7f1vI A mentor of mine in robotics talks about how the people at his research group would watch a video from an old Julia Childs TV show of her chopping vegetables and doing other cooking tasks and they would try to figure out how long until a robot could do those things.
    - thunky 2y ago
      This spasm would have ruined my dishes: https://youtu.be/F_7IPm7f1vI?t=80 https://youtu.be/F_7IPm7f1vI?t=80
  - 2y ago

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I was thinking the opposite. I was thinking (after seeing another company selling a pop-up button for $8) that here is a company that is actually making shit — and constantly (perhaps slowly) making it better. From dog to human. And, as I understand it, from hydraulic to electric. Looking in particular at video #3, I get a sense that there has had to be a lot of very expensive iteration to get to something that has nearly exactly the degree of motion of a human. Maybe the problem with the videos is that we have come to expect this as "normal" and no longer viral. Now, that's kind of a wild thought. But to your question about when they will be deployable — I would hazard to guess that cost is the issue. If these came down a few orders of magnitude in cost I suspect we will start seeing them deployed.

whizzter 2y ago
And that's the part that makes me wonder if BD will ever "make it", starting 20 years ago they probably had to make quite specialized algorithms with a ton of hardcoding to make their robots work (and it was impressive then). Just starting 15, 10 or even 5 years ago neural networks have been acing these kinds of "balancing" problems in other areas but with an entirely different architecture. In 2025 with the rapid expansion of other "AI" fields, I would expect a robot to weld a scaffold from loose parts and THEN cartwheel off it, go to a human handler and pick up an rifle and then hit a target 100 meters away (or similarly "different" task from the welding to show versatility).

mapt 2y ago

Those quad dogs are delivering rations and ammo to Ukrainian trenchlines. There was talk about them being employed even further forward a few times, but I think aerial drones are a lot less complicated & expensive to build, harder to shoot, and most importantly easier to maintain a long-distance wireless connection to.

demaga 2y ago
Or wired connection. There are drones that use fiber to resist to electronic attacks. Of course, it's basically for suicide missions only where you fly directly into deep enemy-controlled territory.
Lanolderen 2y ago
That's inline with my impressions in general. Dogs, humanoids can better interact with the environment but even back in the day the Boston Dynamics dog marketing was to a large extent automated infrastructure monitoring with things like thermal cams and less so the actual intervention which means you can just get drones with thermal cameras and skip the whole walking issue/cost. On the other side if you need interaction you can just get an arm. My current employer is looking at the humanoid robots more so for the marketing that they can do things "magically"/without careful preprogramming and adapting to conditions but if you can do that with a humanoid, you can do it with an arm for cheaper still. The space where you need monitoring, interaction and movement to me seems very limited and even undesired. There's a reason we avoid having people do the entire process from start to finish and like putting them in as short as possible loops..

sveme 2y ago

For me, the problem is that while I find these videos extremely fascinating, I'm missing the whole interaction part - it is unclear to me how much of these movements are preprogrammed and how far away the engineers are from having these robots being able to respond to complex requests. This mapping from human language to motor action needs to be the next step (something that Nvidia is working towards).

thomassmith65 2y ago

It's robotics, which is an actually difficult technology. What Boston Dynamics has achieved in the past two decades is impressive. It took decades for computers, after they appeared in government projects, to become ubiquitous. There were many problems to solve. In our era, we're just used to average companies hyping up piddling, niche products by calling them new technologies. Sure, if the 'technology' is an electric juicebag squeezer or something, someone can get it from research to market within a year. All that is aside from whether it's a good idea to thrust robots into the world as quickly as possible. Between robots and AI, we could lose a billion jobs in a short time period.

intrasight 2y ago

Their videos were a hit 42 years ago when I was in school. Of course back then Atlas's great, great, great grandfather could only hop in a circle with a center tether. So when you see the full history, you realize the progress has been fucking amazing.

marcusverus 2y ago

I remember thinking that the humanoid robotics revolution was imminent after seeing ASIMO walk around 2010[0], but after observing the slapstick comedy that was the DARPA Robotics Challenge around 2015[1], it seemed that we had actually made zero progress. But I haven't felt that way in years! My feeling at this point is that the best humanoid robots have, from a hardware perspective, surpassed the "minimally viable product" threshold. By this I mean that they are physically capable of completing enough tasks that would make them worthwhile a worthwhile product. They are physically capable of walking the dog, folding the laundry, picking up the living room, bringing in the groceries, etc. It's possible that there are reliability issues to address, but given that the newest generation of bots are fully electric, it's hard to imagine that this is a more difficult problem than those they've already solved. At this point, we're just waiting on the software to catch up. And surely this problem seems far more doable today than it did 20 years ago, given all the progress we've made in machine vision and machine learning! We'll know that the robotics revolution is truly imminent when the big players start pouring capital into development. Tesla has already joined the fray. I expect more will follow in the next few years. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0xLVCb-OA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA0xLVCb-OA [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo