This is all more or less correct… just a few things to add (I'm on Team IHMC Robotics) :) 1. It's highly unlikely that this version of Atlas can get up from a

This is all more or less correct… just a few things to add (I'm on Team IHMC Robotics) :) 1. It's highly unlikely that this version of Atlas can get up from a fall under its own power, at least not expediently; it weighs much more than the old one and it actually has a slightly weaker hydraulic system. The old pump motor was a constant speed/constant displacement 3000 PSI system. The current one is a variable speed/constant displacement system that tops off at around ~2600 PSI, and the robot is around 35-40 lbs heavier than the old one. Even if the arms are strong enough, none of the COTS grippers that integrate with the robot could handle getting up; the fingers would explode. I've seen lots of videos of the old tethered Atlas getting up. I find it amusing to think that the current one could pick itself up. 2. We (IHMC) don't do ZMP based stability. All of our walking/balancing is based on something called Instantaneous Capture Point, that the head of our lab pioneered during his PhD and which several other researchers have gone on to refine over the last 10 years or so. Lots of people use it for fall recovery (MIT does in their recent Atlas video that's similar to ours) but we also use it for walking as well. We call it ICP, but vision people get cranky when we say that because ICP is also short-hand for Iterative Closest Point. 3. amjaeger is correct, our robot was very badly damaged by our falls on Friday. Enough that we were very worried about how it would impact our performance. Our falls on Friday were both more or less the result of operator error (with some hardware problems mixed in, but mostly operator error), and our stability issues on Saturday were the result of the falls on Friday. 4. The comment about manipulation being pure teleop is a little reductionist. It is teleop in the sense that it's not autonomy, but almost nobody was doing direct joint servoing which is what I usually think of when somebody says pure teleop. For example, we actually operated continuously during comms blackouts. When we cut out the wall on Saturday, almost the whole thing happened during a blackout. But when your 400lb robot doesn't have a safety line, it behooves you to be extra careful. We cut out the wall just as slowly during perfect comms back in the lab because there's lots of ways to screw that task up.