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Extreme parkour with legged robots

extreme-parkour.github.io

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Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#41

Post by pixl97 »

stavros wrote: post #13
hanniabu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General dystopian outcomes. After world powers harness robotic armies, revolts will no longer be possible and citizens will be permanently enslaved and must succumb to whatever oppressions are put on them.

Why is walking the salient technology that will enable this? Why not wheels, or treads, or flying?

Part of it is because we already have flying/wheeling drones. Walking is just the last step of all terrain capabilities.

Flying can get you almost anywhere, but not quite. It is both very loud and has issues in enclosed spaces.

Wheels/tracks are very efficient at moving mass, but have issues crossing some materials such as exploded building internals like you would find in a war zone.

Walking/climbing is the last bit to get you inside enclosed 'human' spaces such as buildings and tunnels.

The war occurring now in Gaza would be an example area of what future battle would look like.... A target building it hit by a bomb and mostly destroyed. Smaller automated drones quickly fly over the area and assess visible targets and threats for follow up artillery. Multiple mobilized traced/wheeled heavily armored drones would address any residual ground level threats. Upon reaching the target building the larger drone vehicles would release multiple smaller 'walking/crawling' style drones to ascend the rubble, either addressing any remaining targets themselves, or reporting back to a command station for some other group to make a decision on what to do next. The final goal of these walking units is to probe deep into the rubble to ascertain if any tunnels survived the initial bombing, and if so to begin mapping any threats in said tunnels.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#42

Post by Animats »

"A single neural net policy operating directly from a camera image, trained in simulation with large scale RL, can overcome imprecise sensing and actuation to output highly precise control behavior end-to-end."

So that's what it takes. That's so much simpler than the way Boston Dynamics does it, working out all the dynamics in simulation first. It's amazing to see this done from vision to actuators in one net. It's now much less of a mystery how animals managed to evolve the ability to do that.

(I had a go at this problem years ago. I was trying to work out the dynamics from first principles, knowing it would be somewhat off. Then use some self-tuning (a predecessor to machine learning) to fine-tune the thing. Got as far as running up and downhill in 2D in the early 1990s. About one hour of compute for one second of motion.)

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#43

Post by hanniabu »

stavros wrote: post #13
hanniabu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General dystopian outcomes. After world powers harness robotic armies, revolts will no longer be possible and citizens will be permanently enslaved and must succumb to whatever oppressions are put on them.

Why is walking the salient technology that will enable this? Why not wheels, or treads, or flying?

It's not necessarily walking, just the improvement in mobility which is one precursor to self-sufficient policing

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#44

Post by bravura »

I was staying in Whitechapel, London recently. There are many religious folks there who are horrified by dogs, don't want dogs to touch them, and shun dogs and make a huge berth for them on the street and inside, like in buses.

I was on dog walk duty and always held the lead close, but I knew they were worried I wasn't so conscientious and would let my dog friend run amuk on their garments.

So I was trying to imagine an example of a creature that would horrify me similarly. Like perhaps if people had giant BEETLES as pets, and thought it was all grand, and I was like "what the FUCK are you on, my friend?", and I was pretty happy with that.

But I think a closer cut to how disconnected this is from what seems appropriate, and normal, and reassuring, would be these robots. Clearly, some people don't really understand how horrifying this is, particularly with elevator music as the background. And if you want to know how upsetting the elevator music is as a background to set tone, I strongly urge you NOT NOT NOT to google "crab club" on youtube.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#45

Post by Mistletoe »

mcbutterbunz wrote: post #30
riku_iki wrote: post #23

I am always wondering, why they build such complicated biology inspired robots, while they can build something with wheels and simple levels which allows robot to jump over obstacles and turn upside down if it landed on the back.

Its my assumption that biology inspired robots would adapt better to a biological world. It might also be easier to solve problems by copying those who have already figured out a solution.

Nature can’t really make a nice wheel and free wheeling hub though. Blood vessels would get ripped off, cartilage etc.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#46

Post by PoignardAzur »

p1esk wrote: post #24
o0banky0o wrote: post #15

It walks into your room, discovers you, and moves in to make the kill, but for some reason the gun trained at an odd angle. You see it take two shots that veer across to the corner of the room before it hilariously enters some self-correcting routine, seems to rediscover you, and finally blows your head off. You get a chuckle before you die

You better have your own robots protecting you.

The only protection from a bad guy with a robot is a good guy with a time machine and a shotgun.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#47

Post by PoignardAzur »

sbierwagen wrote: post #8
082349872349872 wrote: post #2

there ought to be plenty of money in this for delivering explosive payloads... (Edit: although come to think of it, in the animal world, jump height is much more constrained by 9,81 m/s2 than by body size)

Artillery exists. Delivering explosive payloads is a solved problem. Detecting humans is a solved problem. The hard part is reliably distinguishing enemy solders from friendly soldiers or civilians.

I don't know, loitering munitions are pretty much bringing a renaissance to the field of blowing people up.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#48

Post by croes »

gumby wrote: post #35
croes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this improve national security?

They are vehicles that can navigate terrain a wheeled vehicle cannot. So they could do anything from operate as pack "animals" for infiltration teams to be armed drones that creep along the ground, harder to detect than a flying one.

Once again, how does this improve national security?

That's offense not defense. It worsens the national security of your opponent but doesn't strengthen your own.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#49

Post by nightpool »

gumby wrote: post #36
nightpool wrote: post #3

As a reminder: CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense, and although there are certainly civilian applications for this technology, one of the most likely short-term applications is improving legged drones for battlefield deployment (often, it should be said, in humanitarian roles, including search and rescue, or support roles, such as ammo, food, and water resupply, bu…

> CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense Is this not the case with all the major R1 institutions? Walt Rostow may no longer be deciding on troop levels from his office in the MIT Economics department (that cause MIT to "divest" its overtly military work into figleaf organizations) but still, after that, ARPA (later DARPA) poured hundreds of millions into the institutio…

I can't really speak for many other institutions. I know plenty of robotics labs that are doing completely civilian work under NSF grants, grants from corporations, some civilian manufacturing and automation work through the national labs, etc. And even among those institutions working on DARPA-funded projects, not every institution has NREC right down the street working on autonomy systems for ground combat vehicles: https://www.nrec.ri.cmu.edu/solutions/defense/other-projects.... The research done by students at CMU directly makes these types of weapons platforms possible, and vice versa.

It's certainly true that many, many universities are deeply embedded with the DoD, defense contractors, and other weapons manufacturer ecosystems. Certainly CMU isn't exceptional here. But I think it's very important to keep in mind the reality of these programs when they come up in the news, like this article, which is why I left the link to how "the other side" sees these types of research programs.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#50

Post by nightpool »

beambot wrote: post #38
nightpool wrote: post #3

As a reminder: CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense, and although there are certainly civilian applications for this technology, one of the most likely short-term applications is improving legged drones for battlefield deployment (often, it should be said, in humanitarian roles, including search and rescue, or support roles, such as ammo, food, and water resupply, bu…

Ironic comment given the implied nationalities of the coauthors (Xuxin Cheng, Kexin Shi, Ananye Agarwal, and Deepak Pathak) and the chosen robot form factor (Unitree)

Is it? I think it's important to understand that this type of robotics research requires serious ethical considerations no matter where it happens or who works on it—this work specifically was funded by the US military, but it applies just as equally to weaponization projects happening within China.
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