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MIT cheetah robot lands the running jump [video]
- dang 11y agoUrl changed from http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/29/oh-no-mits-cheetah-robot-can-jump-over-hurdles-while-running http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/29/oh-no-mits-cheetah-robot-..., which points to this.
- 5h 11y agoI really like that this happens on HN. A crap gif and half a paragraph add nothing to the video imho.
- tugberkk 11y agoAside from being a great development; I am really scared that robotics is improving this much. It feels like we are creating our own potential enemy.
- tim333 11y agoHopefully the real world version will end up a bit more benign than the movies.
- tracker1 11y agoRight now, the closest we seem to have to a learning machine is IBM Watson, and to be honest, it's really far behind human intellect in terms of adaptive thought. Though maybe in 10-20 years Watson may evolve into something much more capable... As to a robot army + an evolved computer intelligence... that could be scary. It's easy to imagine something like remove anyone that isn't a "pure" X... where X is a combination of racial and religious dogma. In practice, and with practical limitations on resources, it's hard to imagine such an army that isn't outmatched (at least in numbers) by armed people (lets not weaken the 2nd amendment too much).
- methodover 11y agoUgh, I really dislike this sentiment. Even assuming the most extreme possibility -- that we create a powerful, sentient machine -- this is no different than what every species on this planet has been doing for a few billion years now. Creating life is what we earthlings do. And yeah, maybe that life form you create goes on to do horrible things. But maybe it goes on to do really good things. You don't know until you try.
- nodata 11y ago> this is no different Creating something with our knowledge and the ability to learn ever faster than us is very different.
- icebraining 11y agoYes, but this robot is not that. It's not even a step in that direction.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoUntil you have achieve the desired mobility, then tweak it to walk upright instead of using 4 legs, and insert a Watson enabled chip into it.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoPersonally, I'm not concerned with that. I'd be more concerned about powerful robots controlled by governments/corporations/anyonewhohasaninterestincontrollingyourbehaviour. Look at what's happening in Yemen. The population there lives under the fear of drone strikes by the US (that includes the civilian population). If governments are prepared to do that with drones, what reason is there to suspect they'll turn down using something that's ground-based to impose control?
- icebraining 11y agousing something that's ground-based to impose control? I think we have that, they're called soldiers.
- onion2k 11y agoThis is an understandable reaction considering how much like the robots in films it is. It's movement is Terminator-like, perhaps unsurprisingly given what James Cameron was trying to evoke when he directed the film. That slow, juddering, 'unstoppable' machine type of movement reminds us of things that are more powerful than we are - heavy machines, trucks, industrial equipment. If it was more rounded and animalish, maybe with a fur coloured coat of paint, I think it'd be a lot less scary.
- shabble 11y agoI imagine as the tech matures, some sort of flexible skin will be developed, to protect the actuators from weather and mud/sand, and to muffle the sound of the motors and valves. If you wanted to get really fancy, eInk squid-like camouflage could be embedded in the outer layer. Longish fur might actually work quite well for those 2 purposes, they're not entirely dissimilar from the requirements imposed on real animals who evolved it.
- SuddsMcDuff 11y agoI felt the same when I had my first child.
- jguimont 11y agoThe hell with the world, I can make my own people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcbOplZHFfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcbOplZHFfg
- joshrotenberg 11y agoIt's really the subsequent children that you should watch out for. Now they'll have an accomplice.
- enlightenedfool 11y agoYour feeling is normal. But that seems to be the only way humans could defeat death. Prolong brain function and transfer to robots. We will get over it.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoOn the plus side, I would hazard a guess that the 'S' part of PTSD is related more to killing people than it is to killing "things". So warfighters who are disabling and destroying the enemy's machines may be much less scarred by that than ones who were killing the enemy directly. As for a generalized fear of the emerging technology, that fear is simply your body's way of telling you that it is important that you get it right (other people will feel it too). Same is true for the advancement in laser diodes for example, or recombinant DNA, or lithium ion battery packs. Growing up is scary, but you can't stop it from happening, you have to mature as it goes along or die.
- whyaduck 11y agoWe need to work on creating robotic civilians (bystanders | peasants | victims), too. Then the circle will be complete and the war-makers can burn through their $trillions without actually killing anyone.
- superuser2 11y agoAI and robotics have nothing to do with each other. The first "conscious" algorithm will run on a commodity computer, maybe an ASIC. It would certainly not have the ability to commit violence unless we allowed it to connect to the control system of a weapons platform. It would quite possibly make itself rich, and probably morph itself into a distributed system running nodes on millions of compromised machines (+ the datacenters it buys). From here, AI could possibly buy itself access to things like weapons platforms, but ultimately this is contingent on humans selling them. If a lab has a robot capable of committing violence, and an AI algorithm and it wants to put them together, then yes running the algorithm locally on the robot is probably a bad move. But you could proxy between the AI and the actuators, with the ability to override movements you don't like, for example. The more likely scenario is that these things will be used as instruments of war, running dumb/normal algorithms and controlled by commanders in the field. In that case, just another one of the many creative ways we have to kill each other.
- XCSme 11y agoWell, it is very impressive, but still a very long way from what a real animal can do. What if the obstacle is at the edge of a canyon? It will suicide :D . Those tests are very restricted, but even after they will think the robot is ready, there will be cases they have missed in which it will fail.
- icebraining 11y agoWhat if the obstacle is at the edge of a canyon? It will suicide :D Not to worry, the drone flying ahead will already have mapped the terrain :)
- Qantourisc 11y agoAnd tagged you as its next kill :p
- Xophmeister 11y ago> there will be cases they have missed in which it will fail i.e., parity with real life.
- davidw 11y ago> What if the obstacle is at the edge of a canyon? It will suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump
- SuddsMcDuff 11y agoRobot suicide, what an interesting prospect. I can't think of any surer sign that and entity has achieved consciousness, than when it makes the decision to end its own "life".
- crusso 11y agoMeh, programs suicide all the time when they access memory locations not in their space. The contentious nature of consciousness is in the "makes the decision" part of your statement, suicide is pretty mundane as far as decisions go.
- Qantourisc 11y agoTo be fair, this looks more like a mountain goat jump. Impressive non the less !
- lucb1e 11y agoMy first thought :)
- benliong78 11y agoI for one welcome our robotic overlord
- bcook 11y agoSeriously. Assuming humans are the pinnacle of intelligence (or anything) is so boring. I will celebrate AI Day. The day we were surpassed by our creation, in every way.
- resonation 11y agoWhenever I see a wasp or a bee or a hornet, I present it with my arm and pray that it will grace me with it's sting, and summon its siblings to join in. What a privilege it is to be subjugated by nature's sentient, motile organisms! My only regret is that these magnificant creatures don't sting me more often, but alas, it is the right of any autonomous insect to do whatever it wishes with it's sting, and who am I, but a lowly mammal, to coerce its gifts?
- bcook 11y agoIf you prefer pain and inaction... Honestly, I do not understand what your point is. Could you explain? (With less attitude?)
- resonation 11y agoWaiting for artificial intelligence to surpass humanity, particularly as if it were a desirable inevitability, and then letting it happen sounds precisely like pain and inaction to me.
- spiek 11y agoThis is such an annoying and useless comment. This same comment is parroted EVERY time there's an article about robots anywhere on the Internet. How are you adding anything to the discussion at all?
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- jolt 11y agoThis reminds me of when i was learning to drive. In the beginning I was only aware of what was immediately in front of the car, and as such, drove very slow and had pay extra attention because a lot of important stuff was coming in to my field of view all the time. Now, when i drive i look further down the road, i plan out how to follow the road, i see the intersection coming up, and try to anticipate the routes of the other cars/bikes and that requires far less energy, than only processing the immediate surroundings.
- baldfat 11y agoIf only more people drove like you and knew who was behind and on the side of them accidents would happen at half the rate.
- dayjah 11y agoI was thinking exactly the same thing. I'm always amazed at how many times a lyft or uber driver does not see a "situation" a little further down the road, resulting in the need to swerve to avoid it versus changing lane early to avoid the last second reaction. I've noticed it in cases where I'm a passenger in a friends car also, but I've always chalked that up to the conversation being a distraction.
- lsaferite 11y agoWell, all the sensory overload you experienced as a novice driver has become background noise that is handled subconsciously now. That lets you focus on more strategic planning of your driving. That's one reason I like countries that mandate a learner sign in cars for new drivers. It lets others around them understand that they are still getting to grips with that sensory overload and allows them to act accordingly.
- jolt 11y agoI see, is there an equivalent for robots? Like putting part of the algorithm in to hardware or something? Or is my "algorithm" still "there", I'm just not as aware that I'm following it?
- chinathrow 11y agoDARPA again. Great to see more money flowing into military research. Irony off.
- Cyph0n 11y agoMilitary research is extremely important. The use of military tech in civilian applications is the reason for a lot of stuff we use daily, as I'm sure you know.
- chinathrow 11y agoIf we had less war on this world, I would be glad to have a few stuff less we use daily. Seriously.
- Cyph0n 11y agoIn a peaceful world, advanced military tech would be solely used as a metric of a country's progress and a deterrent in the worst case. That's my opinion at least.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoThere's no reason that technological progress from the US government couldn't be driven by NASA rather than DARPA. I suspect many peace-loving people would prefer to see that.
- JesseObrien 11y ago"No reason", other than the massive budget constraints NASA faces, and has been facing yearly since the end of the Apollo program. https://static.nationalpriorities.org/images/charts/2015/total-desk.png https://static.nationalpriorities.org/images/charts/2015/tot... See that Science heading there on the chart? It's hard making the world a better place on a 0.7% budget. DARPA, however has access to that Military heading, 16.3%.
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- vlasev 11y agoNo one seems to be discussing how this can be improved! Here are a few points: 1. Real cheetahs don't run like that. The action of both pairs of legs is staggered for smoother motion and control. Check this out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=131wvVGjZUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=131wvVGjZUc 2. Looking at this jumping-over-obstacles video, it seems like the robot is lacking flexibility. The real life cheetah's hind legs go quite a bit underneath in preparation for push off. Contrast this with how the robot's hind legs are a little too behind and the robot stutters a bit after every jump. If the robot could put its hind legs further it would make for a smoother landing.
- jeremyjh 11y agoPerhaps the engineers who designed cheetah did learn about how real Cheetahs run, but there are other constraints that are not obvious.
- interdrift 11y agoThat's very likely considering what they are building.
- SuddsMcDuff 11y agoIt seems obvious that the engineers at Boston Dynamics have spent an awful lot of time carefully studying and analysing the movement of real 4-legged animals. There's a big difference though between learning valuable lessons & taking cues from natural bio-mechanics, and trying to emulate them.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoMuscle, bone, and sinew are about a hojillion times better in building active structures than motors, pneumatics, etc. It'll be a while before robots are as flexible and dexterous as animals.
- bliti 11y ago1.The goal is not to build a cheetah, buy to learn from them. One thing to consider is that this team is constrained by materials. What works for an animal will likel not transfer directly due to the difference in materials. Harmonics are well absorbed by tissue but the robot may have issues with them. 2. How did you come to this conclusion? Have you built a robot that mimics an animal? If so, may you provide some insight into your discoveries? Robotics programmer/builder here. Always interested in learning about the work of others.
- DanBC 11y agoThis is amazing. I am so impatient though - I want to scatter bricks on the landing-side of the jump to see how it copes.
- enraged_camel 11y agoIt would probably get annoyed and shoot you with its lasers.
- wayanon 11y agoInteresting the obstacles are always magenta.
- Gravityloss 11y agoIn a war room somewhere: "Have you seen this video? We have to repaint the robocheetah obstacles as soon as possible!"
- ajbetteridge 11y agoSo they can spend millions developing the robot, but the best they can do for tracking while they film from the side is a guy pushing another guy in a big plastic box on wheels. Way to go geeks!
- seren 11y agoIsn't it the perfect parable for SW dev/Engineering ?
- tagawa 11y agoI don't see the problem. It was quick and easy and got the job done - a nice avoidance of over-engineering.
- SuddsMcDuff 11y agoIt speaks volumes about their engineering principles - KISS is alive and well at Boston Dynamics :)
- tgb 11y agoIs this related to Boston Dynamics? The work looks very similar, of course, but I don't see their name associated to it. According to this article, Boston Dynamics has it's own "Cheetah" http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/mit-cheetah-robot-running http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardwar...
- ynniv 11y agoMIT is probably developing advanced algorithms for the Boston Dynamics platform.
- tgb 11y agoI actually can't find any information on their site that that's the case either. I'd have thought they would mention that if it were the case, and this looks a bit different from any of the Boston Dynamics ones I could find.
- tlo 11y agoI, for one, welcome our new cheetah robot overloads!
- vladtaltos 11y agocould skynet be too far away ? - with deep neural nets making ai advances in strides and - with robots/drones learning to autonomously navigate we should start including skynet clauses into our source codes immediately!
- cdnsteve 11y agoWould be funny to see a group of these performing synchronously at half time.
- kirk21 11y agoLove it that a PhD student had to push the camera guy at the end.
- frevd 11y agoTerminator, the humble beginnings - looks and feels like rats!
- return0 11y agoIs the goal here explicitly to mimic animal locomotion? Does this have unique advantages to something that rotates/rolls etc?
- jader201 11y agoThe left and right front/hind legs moving in sync looks unnatural. I wonder if this is ultimately the best way to distribute weight and balance of a four-legged object, and why living four-legged creatures do not run like this? Alternatively, would it be better if the robots also ran more life-like, or is there a benefit (besides the ease and simplicity of engineering the physics) to the robots running like this? I.e. will they ultimately have the robots running more life-like?
- Sputum 11y agothis is how cheetahs run http://giphy.com/gifs/animal-running-7lz6nPd56aHh6 http://giphy.com/gifs/animal-running-7lz6nPd56aHh6
- gadders 11y agoThat's how they run flat out. Do they alter their gait like horses, I wonder?
- jader201 11y agoActually, if you slow it down, the left/right legs are stil not quite perfectly in sync (at least not in this case): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuyeVN7PuTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuyeVN7PuTM
- oldpond 11y agoCorrect, and it's clear the machine does a little correction cycle after it lands. Very cool though. Now they need to work this into the pathfinding algorithms.
- mrgoldenbrown 11y agoRabbits run (or is it hop?) like that - front paws side by side, rear paws side by side.
- jmilloy 11y agoI noticed the opposite in this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g Which is to say, it looks more natural and more balanced with the legs out of sync.
- joeblau 11y agoedit: Spoiler Alert! I just watched Ex-Machina and for some reason, I just pictured the robot running out of the building after its last test without the safety harness and setting itself free.
- ionwake 11y agoI waited months to watch this and read your spoiler. I don't think your comment has added any benefit to mankind.
- deepnet 11y agoStuart Russel of AI a Modern Approach fame ( with Norvig ) asks us to consider the ethics of AI research - killer robotics, & hunter drones. http://www.nature.com/news/robotics-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence-1.17611#/russell http://www.nature.com/news/robotics-ethics-of-artificial-int... He calls for a moritorium until we can get a neural net to learn Asimov's 1st Law. Should the self driving car swerve into you to avoid greater moral hazard ? Humour aside as researchers and robotocists do we have a moral obligation to obey the 1st Law ?
- jevinskie 11y agoI would believe there to be a significant, non-zero risk that in the R&D process of developing a 1st law neural net, a malicious neural net is created first.
- LesZedCB 11y agoI thought the whole point of Asimov's exploration of his three laws was that they were fundamentally insufficient for any real ethical security.
- jotux 11y agoI think the only interaction most people have with Asimov's laws is just reading them and thinking they seem reasonable. If people actually read the stories they'd learn that the robots are constantly put into situations that pose exceptions to the laws or force the robots to make decisions that fundamentally break them.
- anon4 11y agoI liked the story with the robot on Mercury running in circles, because it couldn't go closer to a lake from which it was tasked with taking a sample without being destroyed by the heat, but couldn't go back, because it would mean disobeying a direct command. Of course, a longer inference chain would show that not going back would lead to the people at the base dying, but you have to cut it somewhere, because if you let a robot indefinitely extrapolate possible actions, the only rational thing for it to do would be to self-terminate, since breaking the third law with certainty is obviously preferable than the infinitely many possibilities of infinitely many times breaking the first and second laws.
- robmccoll 11y agoAmazing algrotihms! But seriously... impressive work :-)
- rebootthesystem 11y agoAll of this is neat stuff. That said, for some reason I am still bothered by the use of laser range finders. To me it makes it all feel like a parlor trick. The easiest way to produce machines that can be used in "Oh, wow! Look at that!" videos that continue to bring in grants. These robots should use binocular vision and nothing else. Oh, wait a minute, that's hard, isn't it? Yup.
- IgorPartola 11y agoWhy should they use binocular vision?
- shabble 11y agoThe bad reason is "Because we do, and we're the best. Those researchers are just slackers". One good reason would be to prefer passive sensing, because LIDAR is equivalent to waving a laser across the entire landscape, precisely announcing your own position to anyone watching. Multi-ocular systems can be entirely passive assuming enough ambient light, so they're much harder to detect.
- sopooneo 11y agoWhy? Why should they be limited to the same hardware configuration as their biological analogues?
- rebootthesystem 11y agoBecause they have to interact with our world, not a lab or a factory. If you are building a robot for a factory, put limit switches, magnetic sensors or whatever you want on it. If, on the other hand, you want to build robots to live, work and interact with humans they need to be capable of understanding my world the way I do. Think of a robot interacting with a toddler or a bunch of kids. This is monumentally harder than scanning in front of the robot with a laser to detect geometry, measure height and approach speed and then plan a jump. Much harder. Not to diminish their work but the math and physics seem almost trivial. Figure out the x-intercept, width and height of a parabolic path that will give you enough margin of error not to touch the obstacle. Then do the math on the time delay between the front and rear legs based on approach speed. Then plan the gait in order to be able to have the legs at the right point at the right time. So long as you have a robot that can jump it's a done deal. Again, I know it is more complicated than that, but it doesn't compare to the degree of sophistication a robot would have to have to manage the real world with binocular vision. My 9 year old kid can fly remote controlled model airplanes tooling along at over 60 miles per hour just using his eyes. You don't need millimeter accuracy laser measurement devices, you need to understand the world around you in some context. Context: I built walking robots (not toys, research grade) over 25 years ago. Today there's virtually no difference in actuation mechanisms and sensors. A lot of these programs are grant-sucking machines that are reinventing the wheel rather than making true progress. Here are some of the things we need: - True binocular vision systems that can develop an understanding of the environment to various degrees of sophistication (this is hard) - Better actuators. The artificial muscle has yet to be realized. Make your arm limp on the table. You can't do that with a robot. You can simulate it. But it isn't the same thing. You'll actually consume power and spin gears/pumps very fast to be in "limp and compliant" mode. Real flexibility and real compliance are critical for robots that need to interact with people and animals. Every animal on the planet relies on this to interact with the environment. - Better programming paradigms. We are still typing "if" statements and "for" loops to program intelligent robots. A far greater degree of abstraction is required to truly advance the art. No, libraries are not a solution. We need to be able to express concepts to a machine in far more efficient terms. How do you teach a robot to tie a knot on a rope on a table and have that robot think about using that same knot on a sailboat or to restrain a dog to a post? Without telling it that these are options? - Better means of communication with machines. Buttons and knobs isn't how you communicate with your taxi driver or housekeeper. A 5 year old kid should be able to command a machine without having to rock the Linux command line. etc. I guess my argument is that we already know how to build "parlor trick" machines. We've known how to do this for quite some time. Any set of decent mechanical engineers can build a decent walking machine given a reasonable amount of time. Making it walk and even jump is almost just as trivial. Because of the way these departments are funded the truly hard and interesting work might not be done or might not see the same degree of funding. Some of the items I listed above could require 10 to 20 years of solid dedication before the "Oh Wow! Did you see that!" moment is reached. Most of the funding out there isn't smart enough to support these kinds of projects. And so the money goes to the guy who can put a spring-loaded plunger on a little robot with wheels and show it can jump to the top of a building. You know, first year college physics, if not high school physics. This does virtually zero to advance robotics but it sure makes politicians write checks!
- kelvin0 11y agoWow, this is impressive! However I'm still eager to see the matchup against the MIT Antelope.
- wyclif 11y agoIt's only a matter of time until one of these things kills a person.
- nosuchthing 11y agoLove that ingenuity on their camera dolly
- Coincoin 11y agoIs it me or does it seem to have an easier time with the highest obstacle. I though it was a fluke but then it had the same behaviour in free range mode. Is it a random result because of the phase of the obstacle in the run cycle?
- gvozd 11y agoThat's not a cheetah. That's an electric sheep.
- creativityhurts 11y agoYou'll scream this when that electric sheep comes after you.
- SimplyUseless 11y agoRobots are coming! If Moore's law will apply to the progress of Robotics, we have very few years left before we will all be slaves.
- deegles 11y agoHopefully they'll put a saddle on it! What a way to commute...