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

Atlas robot does parkour

blog.bostondynamics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 242 posts

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#161

Post by jpindar »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #89

Are these incredibly expensive or have a regulatory hurdle or something? I feel like we've been seeing increasingly sophisticated demos like this for over a decade now and yet nothing has really made it to market that I can tell. Maybe there just literally aren't many good use cases for the types of robots made by Boston dynamics?

I believe the four legged Spot robots are for sale, but I haven't heard of anyone actually buying them.

They do have support pages and user manuals online.

https://support.bostondynamics.com/s/

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#162

Post by rglover »

stakkur wrote: post #156

”If robots can eventually respond to their environments with the same level of dexterity as the average adult human, the range of potential applications will be practically limitless. ‘Humanoids are interesting from a couple perspectives,’ Kuindersma says. “First, they capture our vision of a go-anywhere, do-anything robot of the future. They may not be the best design for any particular task, but if you wanted to bu…

Because.

Why allow "useless eaters" to roam the planet, dealing with them coughing on your parfait when you can have one of these sanitary machines do it? And of course, when we tell the parfait makers that they're out of a job, they'll freak...now we have the perfect, emotionless authority to keep them in line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU&t=14s

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#163

Post by jjk166 »

djrogers wrote: post #115
nostrademons wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses, so you're not wrong. The weird thing is that the more I study history, the more I think that the real dystopia started a century (and perhaps a couple millenia) before I was born, and we're just so adapted to it that we think it's normal. Take the "[Ro]bot" out of your headlines and those would be headlines from today, and if you ignore that t…

> We were depersonalized by the industrial revolution, and then large numbers of us were killed in the wars that followed. We were depersonalized loooong before that - read up on the 30 years war, or any other conflict before the Industrial Revolution. “Soldiers” of the time were mercenaries, many of whom were pressed in to ‘service’ when their village/town/farm was destroyed by said mercenary company. These mercenar…

Sometimes we forget that the last 3-5 generations were the only humans in history for whom seeing a sibling die in childhood was not the norm. Instead of the industrial revolution dehumanizing us, for the first time ever we are raised from birth confident that we will live long and prosperous lives, that we need not kill nor fear being killed to live in this prosperity. Human life has become much more precious and cherished in modern times, not less. The middle of the 20th century was simply the last time that people who came of age before the massive improvement in living standards was in power in the western world.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#165

Post by rtkwe »

smikhanov wrote: post #164

Honest question: if Boston Dynamics robots are so good, why we never see any news of them cleaning up toxic debris, working in an area of armed conflict, or rescuing people from fires?

They're good at certain things like movement but task planning and execution are still under development. You could maybe use the current version to explore burning buildings but they wouldn't be able to do much more than that, you don't see these lifting shifting loads or dragging things ever which is the kind of things they'd need to do for the toxic cleanup or fire rescue tasks.

For the war fighting it's pretty much always more effective to use things like tanks or drones rather than dealing with walking motions, that's still pretty inefficient.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#166

Post by KineticLensman »

nostrademons wrote: post #46
delgaudm wrote: post #8

I'm not a particularly pessimistic person in general, but I don't know ...this tech, while cool, feels like the precursor to a worse future in general. Maybe I've seen too much sci-fi, but these robots look like optimizing for future soldiers, law enforcement etc. Given all the other Self-Driving / Facial Recognition / Loss of Privacy / Deepfake / "AI is bad at recognizing $situation"-type posts, and as all these tec…

Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses, so you're not wrong. The weird thing is that the more I study history, the more I think that the real dystopia started a century (and perhaps a couple millenia) before I was born, and we're just so adapted to it that we think it's normal. Take the "[Ro]bot" out of your headlines and those would be headlines from today, and if you ignore that t…

> Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses

And the robo-donkey thing was trialled and rejected by USMC for use in the cargo carrying role - too noisy, needed to much direct control and other things

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#167

Post by [deleted] »

scythmic_waves wrote: post #16
dane-pgp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of the comments on the video says, that feeling is an example of the "uncanny mountain" effect.

I'm not so sure. 1. [EDIT: IGNORE THIS POINT] They've done this before. [1] 2. To get more specific, look at the robot's legs around 0:09-0:16. They don't seem to be moving normally. I don't have professional video analysis chops, but I'd put some money on this being fake. Happy be to be proven wrong, though. EDIT: It appears I remembered this story incorrectly, and posted a link without reading it. I retract my firs…

[deleted]

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#168

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #136
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yuval is that you? I have some sympathy for this view, but there's also the fact that at this point we've basically solved hunger from a societal point of view. Deprivation of calories from a population now happens because of war or intentional. At the current time we no longer are at the whim of natural causes of hunger.

But the reasonably reliable provision of calories via agriculture is what allows the size of stable societies to grow, and also what more closely tethers them to particular places. As I^HYuval would say, those are the things that help start the long journey to the mess we're today.

While I totally agree that it is necessary for the problems we have today, I disagree that it's obviously bad or necessarily creates many of these problems.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#169

Post by tempestn »

smikhanov wrote: post #164

Honest question: if Boston Dynamics robots are so good, why we never see any news of them cleaning up toxic debris, working in an area of armed conflict, or rescuing people from fires?

The current robots are a research platform, not a commercial product. The idea is that eventually it would be able to do things like that and many more, but currently huge amounts of choreography and testing are required to produce videos like this one. They've come a long way, but they've still got a long way to go before they could go into an uncontrolled situation and perform usefully, let alone with the level of aptitude apparent here.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#170

Post by mattlondon »

delgaudm wrote: post #8

I'm not a particularly pessimistic person in general, but I don't know ...this tech, while cool, feels like the precursor to a worse future in general. Maybe I've seen too much sci-fi, but these robots look like optimizing for future soldiers, law enforcement etc. Given all the other Self-Driving / Facial Recognition / Loss of Privacy / Deepfake / "AI is bad at recognizing $situation"-type posts, and as all these tec…

Oh I can imagine non violent uses. One of these to do my laundry, dishes, perhaps cooking, wash the car, clean the bathroom, generally tidy up and so on would be pretty good.

Keep it humanoid so it can work in the same space as me, then it can fold itself into a box or something when not working.

Post reply on HN