New Video of BigDog Quadruped Robot Is So Stunning It's Spooky

I can't decide if the bit where he tries to kick it over or the bit on the ice is best.

You know, I knew there was something weirdly familiar about watching that video.

Then someone remarked that it reminded them of a Hunter from Half-Life 2. Now I'm scared.

I think the ice part is better--I doubt any animal would have recovered from that without falling on its side. What I really want to see is a bloopers reel from early in the project.

The Boston Dynamics site is here:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

It seems to me that there is a lot of promising work that will be done in this area of robotics. There is a recently published book on this...

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&#38...

...which suggests we should evolve brains and bodies together in order to get the most natural/most efficient gaits from them.

It seems like a very robust system, and the way it displays the ability to fail gracefully really demonstrates some amazing software. I am very impressed that they are able to un-tether it as well. The fact that they apparently were able to get the power plant and the processing hardware onboard is really very impressive.