Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do You Love Me? [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 478 posts

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#141

Post by lostlogin »

belval wrote: post #111
abootstrapper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bipedal robots aren't a great match for battlefield situations because they lack the ability to do proper decision making and are very expensive. The dogs might be more usable, but even then modern conflicts are not really based on ground war. I don't think those have any significant value over a an actual drone. Now a fleet of tiny quad-motor drones with a few bullets? That could work in high-density urban environme…

> Bipedal robots aren't a great match for battlefield situations because they lack the ability to do proper decision making and are very expensive.

Depressingly accurate. Poor kids are far cheaper.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#142

Post by platelets2020 »

neilpanchal wrote: post #106

I am a huge fan of spartan-like no-bullshit brutalist approach towards their marketing/PR: - No studio setup, just their lab - No artificial lighting - No fucks given about hiding the mess - Robots going through surgery in the background - Song is classy af IMO - Can see the camera man - Can see the engineers/employees - Framing/cinematography isn't as polished (this is a feature, not a bug) - Chipped paint, beaten u…

Impressive rant, but you realize this ad is CGI right? The opposite of everything you're praising.

Or do you believe the cars in car ads are real too?

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/cinematographer-reveals-one-...

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#143

Post by platelets2020 »

espadrine wrote: post #38
sxp wrote: post #4

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…

Hydraulics make robot motion look fake? Have you watched real robots move before? I've never once watched a robot move and thought to myself "that looks fake".

This is how the robot moves IN REALITY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhND7Mvp3f4

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#144

Post by [deleted] »

bozzcl wrote: post #87

I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again." In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously…

[deleted]

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#145

Post by hnaccy »

anigbrowl wrote: post #81
f6v wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for that? I’m genuinely interested what kind of AI can act 100% autonomously on the battlefield.

Why limit to the battlefield? NYPD deployed a BD robot in the field 2 months ago: https://nypost.com/2020/10/29/nypd-deploys-robot-dog-after-b... So far they have only bee used to look rather than touch, but I predict that will change quickly, within the next year or two.

The Dallas police used a police robot to blow up a suspect with C4.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#146

Post by jnurmine »

unwoundmouse wrote: post #64

Jesus y'all are so cynical, commenting on how these are war bots and gonna automate everything away, I just think it's an engineering marvel that these insanely complex robotic maneuvers can be done so fluidly now

I was born cynical and I'm proud of it, so apologies to Boston Dynamics and others, but these things will absolutely be used as war bots and automation surrogates once the time is ripe.

Even so, yes, these robots are truly engineering marvels and I wholeheartedly applaud the team for their hard work!

I just think that squinting the eyes slightly past the "search and rescue", the war applications of this kind of technology are obvious: the Atlas could do perimeter guard duty even in a muddy, slightly sloped or otherwise difficult terrain, but it could also form hunt and kill squads who need no rest, whereas the hunted person or persons presumably would.

As for automation, it will certainly happen too: the Atlas is humanoid-shaped and once it matures to be more independent and capable with environmental manipulation, it could easily function as plug-and-play automation for many tasks currently requiring a human. Pick berries or fruits, do gardening, deliver things like mail/pizza, and so on.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#147

Post by lacker »

neilpanchal wrote: post #106

I am a huge fan of spartan-like no-bullshit brutalist approach towards their marketing/PR: - No studio setup, just their lab - No artificial lighting - No fucks given about hiding the mess - Robots going through surgery in the background - Song is classy af IMO - Can see the camera man - Can see the engineers/employees - Framing/cinematography isn't as polished (this is a feature, not a bug) - Chipped paint, beaten u…

It's a cool ad, but it doesn't seem to be "spartan / brutalist" marketing to me. The point of the ad is to show you how their technology makes robots dance. But, clearly their real product isn't just dancing robots. They put a lot of work into making this functionality, and all that work is just for marketing!

To me, a real spartan approach to marketing is spending very little money on marketing, and just focusing on your product. That seems like the opposite of what Boston Dynamic is doing, because they put so much work specifically into creating these PR/marketing videos. Many of their robot models don't seem to exist for actual products, they just exist for marketing.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#148

Post by neilpanchal »

platelets2020 wrote: post #142
neilpanchal wrote: post #106

I am a huge fan of spartan-like no-bullshit brutalist approach towards their marketing/PR: - No studio setup, just their lab - No artificial lighting - No fucks given about hiding the mess - Robots going through surgery in the background - Song is classy af IMO - Can see the camera man - Can see the engineers/employees - Framing/cinematography isn't as polished (this is a feature, not a bug) - Chipped paint, beaten u…

Impressive rant, but you realize this ad is CGI right? The opposite of everything you're praising. Or do you believe the cars in car ads are real too? [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/cinematographer-reveals-one-...

This is the best compliment for BD.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#149

Post by AareyBaba »

dbcurtis wrote: post #118
tinco wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poses are programmed, but the balance can't be. At least.. if they would be that would be a significant achievement as well I think. So the robots have target poses they should approximate, but how to get there, and without falling over, that's seriously impressive.

Exactly right. SOTA is to continuously solve a trajectory optimization problem in realtime. Probably at a rate of a fews 10’s of milliseconds per solution.

What is SOTA ?

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#150

Post by Gravityloss »

gamegoblin wrote: post #12
CommieBobDole wrote: post #10

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…

There's a similar effect in old movies when a super-strong character picks up a massive boulder that is actually made of styrofoam or something. You can tell that the mass is wrong based on the way it moves. I think this is a similar effect but in reverse -- we know the limbs are heavy and aren't made of styrofoam, so the fact that they are moving like they are is uncanny. Our brains aren't used to motorized and hydr…

Could it be slightly sped up? The robots do make jumps so one could calculate it from that.
Post reply on HN