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How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

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Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#181
post #167
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, that single nano-drone isn't scary. What of a swarm of hundreds?

Cost and complexity. If you have to send so many to overwhelm and bypass all the countermeasures, the cost and complexity of make it a much less practical and appealing solution than just doing it the old fashioned way. I can't see how brass, lead, and gunpowder will ever be more expensive than light weight plastics/composites, electronics, sensors, motors, batteries, plus the actual lethal component. Add to that the…

That depends on the target. The military is quite ready and willing to spend tax dollars on things even if at the end of it there is something cheaper that does the job better.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#182
Not wanting to downplay "how strong dancers are", because they obviously are, especially in their core, but I would imagine that most of the problems with these robots, and Atlas in particular, come from an entirely different weight distribution, rather than strength.

IOW, to achieve the similarly appearing moves, these robots have got to have a lot more strength to achieve the balance that comes naturally to most dancers: also why you rarely get 7ft/2.1m tall dancers doing the ballet/gymnastics style stuff — their weight distribution and "levers" (limb length) are so much different, making many of those moves doubly or three times as hard.

And focusing on their strength in the quotes in the article also downplays dancers' exquisite motor reaction time to reestablish balance (kudo to our brains is what I am saying).

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know. > But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and h…

Still, it's a nice way to shift blame to scientists and engineers, away from people who actually use these tools for evil, or commission development of technologies to use in their evil business models.

All links in the chain are responsible for what they do, there is no single packet of "blame" that gets to reside with any single party, and denying one's responsibility will not make it go away.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent of small kids who just watched the video, I would say 2–3 year old seems about right, assuming kids who do a lot of running around. 3-year-olds can move with significantly more grace (the motions are more intentional, fluid, subtle, and steady, and seem less scripted) than these robots, but definitely can't do a jump precisely the same 10 times in a row, so it's not really apples to apples. Maybe age isn'…

I think your estimate of 6-7 is closer to right. I'm not a parent but as a ballet dancer I get involved in a lot of Nutcrackers, which are showcases for entire schools at all levels. The 5-and-under crowd just generally swarms around the stage, with little attempt at "dance". The 6-8 year olds are beginning to dance, at about this level -- though I would say I saw a few movements by the robots that were remarkably ex…

Oh, there is no way you could get a typical untrained 5 year old to follow this whole choreographed routine.

I am just talking about how smooth and graceful the individual motions are. By age 3 kids who practice something a lot (say, running around barefoot at the playground) are starting to get pretty fluent at it.

The kids have a lot more sensory input, a much more subtle and refined musculoskeletal system with a whole ton of tiny stabilizer muscles, and a pretty impressive neural architecture for learning and refining motions, compared to these robots.

(Which again, is not to criticize the robots, which are also amazing! It is hard to beat 600 million years of animal evolution.)

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#185
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one of these things identify civilians or hold a place like Baghdad? Armies occupy. Those weapons destroy infrastructure and people and not much else. Or do you use them like drones paying soldiers to run them from a container in Kansas. In which case you have the soldier still.

Just like drones used to bomb, as you suggest with Kansas. As time passes though, especially on an actual open battlefield, raw 'kill everything that moves" becomes more of a potential too. However? My logic was predicated upon cost, and if implemented, cost reduction due to all those body bags. You think Nixon and Kennedy were purely motivated by the cost of US soldiers, when they wanted out of Vietnam? They sent th…

They also cared about the PR issues of wiping out villages. They were there to "Liberate" not to wipe out.

You are correct it does make it cheaper (maybe, eventually), but so do bombs or gunships or drones.

These are hella complex machines though. A gun is absurdly simpler as is a drone. And the ground is a lot messier than the air.

The logistics of servicing/repairing them is also going to be hefty. Tanks are a pain for maintenance already and they are much less complicated.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity's goal should be to build AGI and let robots take over - we're doing it, willingly or unwillingly. No need to have blobs of meat hanging around. Intelligence itself is human thing. Whether it needs to have a body / physical metabolic processes to run by injesting cheetos all day, is totally absurd. Evolutionary processes have given us so much unnecessary baggage. Pure abstract intelligence is pretty damn hum…

> Evolutionary processes have given us so much unnecessary baggage 21 years ago, when I started writing a cross-platform digital audio workstation called Ardour, I was convinced that your claim above applied to contemporary mixing consoles. It seemed to be that they had evolved in ways that were deeply constrained by physics/mechanical/electrical engineering, and that there were all kinds of things about their design…

I enjoyed reading your perspective. I find evolutionary processes fascinating contrary to what my original comment imbibes. It’s had a lot of time to optimize :)

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#187
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, its battery runs for 90 minutes. Yep, and that's best case, too (e.g. not running Lidar or complex processing for autonomous function at the same time). Minutes sounds a bit shorter than it is, but nevertheless anything with an endurance under 2 hours cannot run for hours pretty much by definition ;)

It's about perspective. Imagine being pinned down by a squad of these things for "only" 60 minutes. Or being pursued through the forest or an urban environment. That 60 minutes would feel like a very long time. For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero (1980's Sweden overtaken by armed robots, including robot dogs).

> Imagine being pinned down by a squad of these things for "only" 60 minutes. Or being pursued through the forest or an urban environment.

Given the current state of these machines, both these environments would favour humans. Even a fairly untrained average Jane or Joe would have no problems outrunning these things in forests or urban environments, let alone a trained soldier. Not to mention the lack of autonomy.

Everything you see in these promotional videos is carefully choreographed, prepared and pre-programmed in advance for days, and edited:

"There were definitely some failures in the hardware that required maintenance, and our robots stumbled and fell down sometimes." - they shot the first part several times and kept the one that worked best. That's not something you can do in the field outside of a controlled environment.

These robots are still long ways away from posing more of a thread to a soldier than much simpler solution, e.g. a Humvee with a mounted machine gun.

> For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero

The game is based on fiction, not fact, though. The required autonomy just isn't there yet and the video game robots clearly run on magic, not electricity or petrol. They never overheat, they are maintenance free, and they move faster than is currently possible w.r.t. motion planning and image recognition.

It's your typical AM/FM affair: BD is actual machines - pre-programmed or remote controlled, very limited endurance and still impractical for most military applications.

The robots in video games and cinema on the other hand are for the most part in the domain of fucking magic - capable of "120 years of continuous operation on a single power cell" like the Cyberdyne Systems series 800 v2.4 (Terminator), turning themselves from "autonomous swords" into screaming humans (Screamers), are nearly indestructible like Vision (Marvel's Avengers) or strange spiky flying thingamabobs like the Sentinels (Matrix trilogy).

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#188
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 wrote the article; thanks for this info. Since your sister has posted this publicly on her Twitter account, I'll happily add her name to our article if I can get in touch with her/BD to confirm. [Edited to add that we'll contact her before doing so.]

Awesome!!! Thank you so much.

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your estimate of 6-7 is closer to right. I'm not a parent but as a ballet dancer I get involved in a lot of Nutcrackers, which are showcases for entire schools at all levels. The 5-and-under crowd just generally swarms around the stage, with little attempt at "dance". The 6-8 year olds are beginning to dance, at about this level -- though I would say I saw a few movements by the robots that were remarkably ex…

Oh, there is no way you could get a typical untrained 5 year old to follow this whole choreographed routine. I am just talking about how smooth and graceful the individual motions are. By age 3 kids who practice something a lot (say, running around barefoot at the playground) are starting to get pretty fluent at it. The kids have a lot more sensory input, a much more subtle and refined musculoskeletal system with a w…

I was really impressed at how graceful the machines were.

It's not the first time I've noticed that; drones can also be quite graceful. But the dynamic motion of that pendulum is such a hard problem, and as you note, the three year olds solve it with unconscious ease.

Never as gracefully, and there of course the machines have a huge advantage. I spend most of my brain power keeping the tense muscles very tense and the loose muscles very loose, for each and every one of those tiny stabilizer muscles. The machines move straight and smooth in a way I never will. I haven't mastered the simple art of standing there in first position, and probably never will.

(I am not, I would note, any kind of expert. I dance at the level of an 11 year old. Maybe a 10 year old. Which took me years to learn, and I'm very proud of it.)

Re: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

#190
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ex…

> Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano >They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. And can be trivially defeated by some netting, blinded by bright lights/lasers, and/or knocked out of the sky by leaf blowers and umbrellas. Despite what certain propagandaesque sci-fi "warning" videos would have people be…

That escalated. I started with a few power cords for the Roomba and now I never leave home without a laser, net and leaf blower.
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