51–60 of 478 posts
As someone who worked in robotics at CMU in the mid 80s with Whittaker, & Raibert, and Crowley this was definitely super exciting to watch. You've come a long way baby. I remember watching you great, great grandfather hopping around in Raibert's lab in 1984. Yeah, and sort of scary.
Really scary. Whenever I see the latest Boston Dynamics video, I’m always thinking ‘and now imagine it’s hunting you’.
If I didn't know who Boston Dynamics was, I would have said that this is just CGI. The animations look so fake. I think the issue is that they're aggressively smoothing the motion since mechanical systems don't have the ability to accelerate & jerk as fast as biological systems. Cheap mocap animation has the same problem because the frame rate of the capture system is too low. They interpolate between captured keyfra…
I would go further than that and say that it's obviously CGI, though I don't know if that actually means it is CGI - it could be, as you mentioned, some sort of post-processing. Or maybe it's greenscreened and composited together? More than the smoothness, there just seems to be something off about the weight and momentum that you tend to see in high-end, big-budget-movie CGI, but it's hard to put a definite finger o…
It’s hard to shake of the feeling that those aren’t rendered. However, it’s also kind of sad that this amazing technology goes from one owner to another without a clear push into the real world.
Oof. I don’t know how sad it is. Slap some guns on them and they’ll start selling. I kind of hope they stick to dancing and novelty tricks.
It's so freaky looking at this my brain feels like it's CG, spot in particular. Even though being familiar with Boston Dynamics I know its not. Not sure if its just so unreal, or maybe there's something unnatural in the movement or if some scenes were sped up.
It's all fun and games until they install the guns on these things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would go further than that and say that it's obviously CGI, though I don't know if that actually means it is CGI - it could be, as you mentioned, some sort of post-processing. Or maybe it's greenscreened and composited together? More than the smoothness, there just seems to be something off about the weight and momentum that you tend to see in high-end, big-budget-movie CGI, but it's hard to put a definite finger o…
Change playback speed to 50% and it looks more realistic. That's probably realtime and they sped up the video.
It was all fun and games at first. Then the second robot came into the picture. I went LOL. Then Spot came into the picture, and my heart skipped a beat. Then the velociraptor on wheels came into the picture, and I just lost it. I think my brain just melted down. Next stop: Guns. Lots of guns. Time to be afraid. Very afraid.
The velociraptor on wheels is a good name. I shudder to think what war variant machines will resort to when they are running low on ammo. Do robots need to follow the Geneva convention?
Right now there's civil liability for the end customer, integrator, and manufacturer (depending on who failed to follow ANSI/ISO robotic safety guidelines) in industrial automation accidents, and criminal liability if the failure rises to the level of negligence. It honestly works pretty well, every site I've ever worked at has been happy to put safety first and throughput second, to a degree that my ordinarily cynical outlook is pleasantly surprised.
But I don't trust the justice system to correctly follow logical reasoning when these things are used for violence. Who's at fault when a desperate soldier straps something to one of these things and sends it off to commit war crimes - the soldier? The brass who put the soldier in that position with those tools and got that entirely expected result? Boston Dynamics engineers and others who built the tools and shipped them with fine print that says "by clicking OK you agree not to violate the Geneva convention with this"? The robot itself, sentenced to run with worn out bearings and low hydraulic fluid in a long prison sentence?
It brings to mind the Nathaniel Borenstein quote [1]:
> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
If I didn't know who Boston Dynamics was, I would have said that this is just CGI. The animations look so fake. I think the issue is that they're aggressively smoothing the motion since mechanical systems don't have the ability to accelerate & jerk as fast as biological systems. Cheap mocap animation has the same problem because the frame rate of the capture system is too low. They interpolate between captured keyfra…
> The animations look so fake. Let’s talk about why it looks fake. I think it comes from the use of hydraulics. Biological muscle is way less linear (it works more like a second-order control system, where things often overshoot their target before dampening). But one part of it may also be algorithmic: the robot’s Kalman filter (?) may correct for errors from sensor fusion much faster than a human would. I would lov…
Powerful people of the wrong kind will love robots. Robots are loyal and will never say no, will never question orders, they can forget anything at anytime. And they can be implemented in a way so that they cannot feel pain or remorse, they cannot be interrogated, cannot serve as reliable witnesses, etc. Shit will happen and it will be noone's fault. They do not have a DNA, they do not have a face or an accent, they…