Do You Love Me? [video]

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 12:40 AM UTC

newsbinator wrote: post #205

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all very cool looking. However when I watched this video my first thought was “my god they’re going to bring the drone wars to the ground.” I am a robotics engineer and have been focused on robotics my whole life. I worked at Google X on a robotics team with some great ex-Boston Dynamics people, and some of my friends have since gone to work for them. So I do understand what they have achieved. It’s fantastic fr…

This was my first thought as well. Watching them dance, I was thinking, non-jokingly “if they can do this now, what happens when these robots are dancing faster than the human eye can see?”

Post by lacker » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 12:41 AM UTC

cududa wrote: post #217

lacker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cool ad, but it doesn't seem to be "spartan / brutalist" marketing to me. The point of the ad is to show you how their technology makes robots dance. But, clearly their real product isn't just dancing robots. They put a lot of work into making this functionality, and all that work is just for marketing! To me, a real spartan approach to marketing is spending very little money on marketing, and just focusing on…

I don’t think you properly understand “spartan”/ brutalist. The video is using the materials in their most outrageous but possible form to demonstrate their flexibility, and executed in an imposing way. How’s that not brutalist?

Post by rkagerer » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #104

bozzcl wrote: post #87

I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again." In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously…

My sister used live next to the Boston Dynamics facility in Waltham. She'd walk her on the nearby river path and generally disliked the way Boston Dynamics would periodically take over the path and keep her from using. Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Bos…

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

meowkit wrote: post #218

one2know wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone be afraid of these? You should be afraid of stealth drones three miles up with air to ground missiles. They are unstoppable without electronic countermeasures.

Its a bit harder to control how much collateral damage occurs with A2G missiles. Put a rifle on a humanoid robot or small explosive on a drone like in Slaughterbots and that’s much more terrifying.

Post by jcims » Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #235

espadrine wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The animations look so fake. Let’s talk about why it looks fake. I think it comes from the use of hydraulics. Biological muscle is way less linear (it works more like a second-order control system, where things often overshoot their target before dampening). But one part of it may also be algorithmic: the robot’s Kalman filter (?) may correct for errors from sensor fusion much faster than a human would. I would lov…

It can't just be hydraulics though, because to me the most telling moments that look fake are when the robots are jumping - they have too much hang time/too much uniform velocity for the relatively small amount of vertical distance they get. In particular, see the initial jump at 15 secs in the video. It's like the robot is floating instead of jumping.