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Atlas robot does parkour

blog.bostondynamics.com

181–190 of 242 posts

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#181

What makes this really interesting is that all this is achieved with very little or no "AI" (in the context of current machine learning approaches). Purely heuristics based approach to something as complex.

There is weired tendency to use AI for well-understood problems that have formulas and solutions.

Well. yes. Using AI means you learn one theory, and now you can do voice recognition, chess and parkour with state of the art performance (except perhaps when it comes to minimising compute) ...

And then there's where it takes off. There isn't a single human that can come anywhere close to the language knowledge base AI algorithms can build up. Even a team of 100 humans would not have the breadth of languages algorithms have these days. Yes, context understanding humans still have the edge, but it's shrinking every day. But so many language aspects, from translation to grammar, machines outperform all but the very best humans, and 99.9% of all humans even within one language.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#184
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firefighters, nurses, construction workers

When we automate the last jobs that can't be offshored we'll have to ask some questions as a society.

From a nurse's point of view, having an intelligent helper like Atlas doing lifting of heavy patients etc. means saving her back from injury.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#185

What's that dripping from the right robot's right thigh near the end? https://youtu.be/tF4DML7FIWk?t=49 Also are the layers of foam over the landing surfaces they backflip onto needed for dampening?

Sir, are you aware that you are leaking coolant at an alarming rate?

https://youtu.be/z7U3x3uRmi8?t=57

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see the four legged dog robot, I wonder how far we are from the chevaline in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

It's easy to forget sometimes, in the era of cars, how much we gave up when most people in industrialized society stopped riding horses. It's pretty hard to get a horse to careen off a cliff or straight into a tree. The largest risk for riding a horse drunk is that it'll inadvertently scrape you off on a low-hanging branch.

Well, Scottish king Alexander III. died in 1286 when his horse fell off a cliff with him, but that was after sunset, and this kind of death was weird enough that we still remember it.

The # of important people who died in a car after a driver error is much higher.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#188

Is humanoid form factor really best compared to mountain goat / spider? or some other factor is helping decide the choice?

I think the main reason for making a humanoid and human-sized robots is that all infrastructure is made for humans. So keeping a similar form factor is an advantage if you expect it to work in human spaces.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#190

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?

They're currently selling the dog robot for $75k. You can see what their current customers are doing here: https://www.bostondynamics.com/resources/case-studies
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