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How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#131

Post by cbozeman »

richardw wrote: post #28
cbozeman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing scary about these robots, any more than my Roomba is scary. They are tools, and like all tools, they can be used for nefarious purposes or for the benefit of mankind.

If your Roomba was programmed to hurt me I’d surround myself with power cords. This looks like us so it’s easier to see how we’re threatened by it. It’s more visceral. My cats don’t care about my vacuum but if it walked and jumped their neutrons might fire differently.

I can't edit my original comment, or else I'd add this line:

Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano

No one is going to send a fleet of these ultra-expensive Robo-Killers to assassinate you and everyone else on the battlefield. Once these micro-drones can be mass produced cheaply enough, and you can put enough high-explosive on them to fly up to a person's neck and !!pop!! someone's head clean off, you'll see them programmed with swarm behavior and be unleashed onto the battlefield.

They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. More than enough capability to swarm entire battalions and wipe them out.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#132

Post by eplanit »

slumdev wrote: post #124
Vosporos wrote: post #93

Ah yes, doing fortnite dances while committing war crimes

People won't think they're cute when the DOD awards a contract to strap a belt-fed .50 cal to each arm. Hell, why stop with two arms?

Enforcement Droids! Then we can build Delta City.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#133

Post by mrfusion »

unixhero wrote: post #27
jessep wrote: post #2

My sister choreographed this dance, and I’m a little unhappy that she isn’t mentioned here by name. She’s brilliant, and I want her to get credit. Her name is Monica Thomas. Her dance company is called Mad King Thomas. Here is her brand new Twitter account: https://mobile.twitter.com/onetruebonc Her sense of humor is captured by her choice of the song “Do you love me”, which is a winking but still charming reference…

She did an amazing job and is talented for sure. I still absolutely hate those robots. This won't end well.

We need the three laws of robotics now!

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#134

Post by latencyloser »

exikyut wrote: post #105
qayxc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at what the US military has been doing with drones, that scenario doesn't seem that far fetched. This scenario will remain science fiction until we invent a compact power source with an energy density (by both mass- and volume) matching fossil fuels. The military has no use for loud and cumbersome petrol-powered monstrosities like Big Dog (which is why the project was axed) or underpowered robots with an en…

Wait, Spot's power source only lasts minutes? Ah, its battery runs for 90 minutes.

Perhaps enough time to drop a few in with a parachute, hit a target, then possibly "self destruct" somehow, if I'm being imaginative I suppose.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#135

Post by slumdev »

eplanit wrote: post #132
slumdev wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People won't think they're cute when the DOD awards a contract to strap a belt-fed .50 cal to each arm. Hell, why stop with two arms?

Enforcement Droids! Then we can build Delta City.

If they were scaled up to the size of an Enforcement Droid, there would be ample space to solve their battery capacity problem.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#136

Post by qayxc »

rohan_shah wrote: post #125
qayxc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery life is abysmal. These machines use the same batteries as every other piece of contemporary tech. Spot can walk about for 90 minutes top and the more it needs to do (e.g. running additional sensors, performing autonomous functions, etc.), the shorter its battery life will be (I'd guess around an hour is more realistic). Bipedal prototypes like Atlas wouldn't last that long. Think 20 minutes or so for a he…

Robots who could replace some manual labour work within a specified area (say: factories), don't need to rely on batteries. We could attach them with a huge wire and plug it into power supply.

In those specified areas it's also much simpler and more efficient to change the process itself.

Automated warehouses for example don't use legged robots that climb ladders, operate forklifts, and carry boxes around.

Interestingly, the bits of manual labour still required in these areas (e.g. factories) are cheap in terms of manual labour and not doable with the same level of efficiency with even the most sophisticated robots, let alone bipedal ones (you'd change the factory to accommodate to the simplest possible robot design, not vice versa).

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#137

Post by qayxc »

alexpotato wrote: post #126
qayxc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery life is abysmal. These machines use the same batteries as every other piece of contemporary tech. Spot can walk about for 90 minutes top and the more it needs to do (e.g. running additional sensors, performing autonomous functions, etc.), the shorter its battery life will be (I'd guess around an hour is more realistic). Bipedal prototypes like Atlas wouldn't last that long. Think 20 minutes or so for a he…

Then all you need is a centralized "depot" where all of the Spots can come back to and have their batteries swapped out by another robot.

But why even? What would be a realistic use case for such scenario that wouldn't be simpler, cheaper, and more reliably served by more conventional means?

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#138

Post by LeifCarrotson »

exikyut wrote: post #127
jessep wrote: post #2

My sister choreographed this dance, and I’m a little unhappy that she isn’t mentioned here by name. She’s brilliant, and I want her to get credit. Her name is Monica Thomas. Her dance company is called Mad King Thomas. Here is her brand new Twitter account: https://mobile.twitter.com/onetruebonc Her sense of humor is captured by her choice of the song “Do you love me”, which is a winking but still charming reference…

I'm extremely interested to learn how the dance moves were programmed - I'm guessing the standard tablet controller probably doesn't cut it for the level of control necessary. More generally speaking, I'm especially curious if "anyone" buying a Spot would have adequate access to be able to do similar things. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to not been possible for warranty reasons...

I believe so; see https://dev.bostondynamics.com/docs/concepts/choreography/ch... for the choreography API. You don't even have to buy a Spot to write the code, which is impressive in this industry! Now we just need someone to buy one and set it up in front of a webcam with a public SSH login.

There's more documentation at https://github.com/boston-dynamics/spot-sdk and https://dev.bostondynamics.com/. However, it looks like a lot of the choreography is built-in; you can call twerk() or butt_circle() (documented at https://dev.bostondynamics.com/docs/concepts/choreography/mo...) but you don't have access to the raw kinematics, gyros, and accelerometers to generate your own unique moves. It would be amazing if they'd release the full routine to cause your Atlas or Spot to perform the dances, but I'm not aware of that being public anywhere.

For a more general example, check out this video where Adam Savage used a Spot to pull a rickshaw; his programmer was able to work with the API to change the payload tuning of the robot:

https://youtu.be/zyaocKS3sfg?t=1482

It appears that the API is more about what you'd need to make Spot useful in an industrial or demonstration context than to build your own Spot. They want something that a generalist can make do useful stuff out-of-the-box, which makes sense.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#139

Post by iancmceachern »

ralfd wrote: post #77
iancmceachern wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, would the time spent programming and integrating all this be less than just walking the dog? For me, this would defeat the purpose of having my dogs my our life. Having worked in robotics quit a bit this is a common trap. There are plenty of things that we can think of for a robot to do, but most of them would require more concessions, programming and maintenance time than it takes to just do the task, or h…

https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot They promise "repeatable autonomous missions to gather consistent data", so my guess is programming a route and mapping terrain is reasonably easy. There is also remote control and camera access, if that could be triggered to automatically notify you (or a dog walking central command service supervising), for example when your dog is barking/complaining or resists to being dragged,…

But how? How do we program it to know when to call you? Its a non-trivial problem.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#140

Post by jackhack »

thih9 wrote: post #78
jessep wrote: post #2

My sister choreographed this dance, and I’m a little unhappy that she isn’t mentioned here by name. She’s brilliant, and I want her to get credit. Her name is Monica Thomas. Her dance company is called Mad King Thomas. Here is her brand new Twitter account: https://mobile.twitter.com/onetruebonc Her sense of humor is captured by her choice of the song “Do you love me”, which is a winking but still charming reference…

> would require so little from Boston Dynamics We don’t know that. Perhaps it was important for them to not have credits in the video; e.g. to keep attention on the robots. Your sister is credited elsewhere in BD’s article, see other comment [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25682864

One of the reasons for the formation of worker's unions (such as screen actor's guild) is to protect the rights of actors and film workers, at all levels. Receiving proper credit is a big part of compensation. There may be a fine line between a "film" and an "advertisement", and what's more this is surely not a SAG film, but it seems to me that credit for choreography on something like this - where the dance is the core of the content - is appropriate.
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