71–80 of 83 posts
I really wish they'd make tree planting robots
Trees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot.
Do you mean a robot to guard the forest from loggers, or something else?
Seriously, I wonder how the engineers there will feel when these are sold to the military or the police and weaponized. Maybe they say they won't now, but to say it will never happen is wishful thinking IMO.
No doubt, it will continue.
Would be cool to have a mobility device based on their handle robot (the one with wheels). Basically a hybrid of bicycle and wheelchair that can go over stairs, and be safer in case of accidents on the road.
Didn't Segway demonstrate something like that?
Edit: Okay, it's only somewhat Atlas-like, for very low values of Atlas. Dean Kamen first demonstrated the iBOT wheelchair in 1999:
Seriously, I wonder how the engineers there will feel when these are sold to the military or the police and weaponized. Maybe they say they won't now, but to say it will never happen is wishful thinking IMO.
Hard to really get behind such customized moralizing when we’re not really putting ourselves aside as engineers doing grave damage but on a longer, vaguer timeline.
Our linear progression towards yearly updates is hardly warranted anymore. Exponential breakthroughs are pushed to the side with our fetishizing stable revenue over R&D, low taxes, unicorns built on cut/paste-able software IP, and mathematical gamesmanship, and eyeball addiction over variety of ideas.
Purposefully stimulated chemical addiction to agency of self indulgence and nihilism is generating economic activity, not novel invention.
Take some solace that it’s not all your fault: We’re not allowed to assess the validity of many key economic assumptions, even with historical evidence like the pre-80s era of high taxes and strong unions.
Just trust that non-gods picked correctly for all time decades ago, and iterate on their meaning!
Really having a hard time with the glaring hypocrisy of all first worlders right now. Science! Oh but also yeah just leave economics alone, the physics there has to be read different.
Take yourself a bit more seriously first and we’ll moralize about others later.
IMHO, what BD really needs is a specific target use case to build towards. Right now Spot/Handle/Atlas are being positioned as robotics platforms. They're leaving it entirely up to others to figure out the use-cases based on the platform. However, without a really salient use-case to demonstrate why a $75k quadruped is better than a similarly priced remote-controlled and tracked robot, it's hard to envision how these…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot.
> Trees plant themselves, they've been doing it for millions of years! What we need is an anti-deforesting robot. Do you mean a robot to guard the forest from loggers, or something else?
The problem is humans are taking over nature. Planting a couple of trees here and there is pointless if you're going to cut them down again for real estate or farm developments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was, before Google. It cost about US$120 million to get Big Dog working. At least those were the reported DARPA contract amounts.
Funny because yesterday there was a post on HN from a guy who made a DIY robot that looked very much like a small Big Dog. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24484129
Still, it shouldn't be that hard to make a small version of Big Dog technology now. They put a lot of money into fast hydraulic servos, which you no longer need for anything smaller than a horse. Gyros and accelerometers are cheap now, because they're phone parts. Motors and motor controllers are much better and cheaper now. Big Dog's compute power was a Pentium 4, which is nothing today. Force feedback sensors for the feet are still expensive, because there's no mass market. You need those for slip control.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wind-Up-Wooly-Walker/194850858
Would be cool to have a mobility device based on their handle robot (the one with wheels). Basically a hybrid of bicycle and wheelchair that can go over stairs, and be safer in case of accidents on the road.
> Would be cool to have a mobility device based on their handle robot (the one with wheels). Basically a hybrid of bicycle and wheelchair that can go over stairs, and be safer in case of accidents on the road. Didn't Segway demonstrate something like that? Edit: Okay, it's only somewhat Atlas-like, for very low values of Atlas. Dean Kamen first demonstrated the iBOT wheelchair in 1999: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a trend that gives me hope for the future. There's ever-increasingly advanced technology and technical knowledge accessible/affordable to the public, both hardware and software. What used to cost the military millions of dollars to develop, are now mass-produced and distributed, to fit in a pocket or to build one yourself. Sure, the cutting edge stuff will always be in the realm of experts with funding, but t…
I don’t think it’s advancing technology that’s allowing this. It’s not physically constructing or programming a robot that’s so expensive, it’s iteration of designs to get to that point. A hobbyist can build a small working jet engine at home, but their hardly starting from scratch. Further, building a modern full scale General Electric GE90 is extremely far beyond what a hobbyist can accomplish. If anything the true…
I actually wosh they would stop.
Dang unpopular opinion on a tech forum I guess but I'm with you, and if I show the Boston Dynamics stuff to anyone not a tech enthusiast I'm likely to get a "why are they building executioner robots" It's like Elon's global internet. There's definitely some lives to be improved with video chat deployed anywhere on earth, but I don't take that to be a benefit worth the cost of enabling worldwide real time surveillance…