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An electric new era for Atlas

bostondynamics.com

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Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#311

Post by lanternfish »

jvanderbot wrote: post #306
fragmede wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not because of science fiction stories, it's because things designed for human to use, is designed for a humanoid form factor. If you want to accomplish a task, it's going to be reflected by that machine. Eg a conveyor belt doesn't look like a human. But if you want swap a robot where a human used to be, it's far easier if that robot is humanoid and has the same approximate capabilities. Thus, we have humanoid r…

Can someone point out where "powered rollerskates" are strictly worse than legs in civilized urban human environments, to an extent that a few extra hundred billion dollars of R&D are warranted? The "approximate capabilities" of a human are: moving around, and picking things up / fine manipulation. Wheels + arms does that just fine, and eliminates a lot of power, complexity, fragility. And it also potentially adds. T…

The obvious answer is stairs. It seems like right now Spot is getting the most use as a highly mobile camera platform for automated inspection in industrial environments. Many of these have a lot of stairs.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#312

Post by Animats »

jvanderbot wrote: post #308
Animats wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work that way. Hydraulic systems have very little "give", unless you put a hydraulic accumulator (an air tank with a fluid/air barrier) in the system. Electric motors have plenty of "give". Forcing a motor to turn backwards won't hurt it. The gear train is usually the weak point. As motors and controllers have improved, robot gear reduction ratios have decreased, which reduces the load on the gear train an…

I stand corrected! Thank you. I'm still mostly convinced that harvesting the energy and re-using it ala elastic tendons is a decently good idea. But probably far too complex.

It's mostly for distance running. Humans get about 70% of energy back in running. Cheetahs, about 90%.

Variable compliance muscles are desirable, but hard to do. A pneumatic cylinder with adjustable pressure on both sides will do it, and Festo builds a lot of that for industrial automation. Two opposed springs pulled on by two positional actuators will do it, but that's kind of bulky. There's a hack called a "series elastic actuator", which is a rigid positional actuator with a stiff spring on the end. When it gets some pushback, the spring compresses, and the motor frantically tries to move the positional actuator before the spring bottoms out. This allows you to simulate a spring with off the shelf screw jacks.

Those new direct-drive motors are a good solution. Direct-drive pancake motors have been around for a while, but they used to be about a foot across. Now they're smaller. Probably a spinoff of drone motor technology.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#313

Post by chefandy »

serf wrote: post #299
makeitdouble wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it has ever been about complexity or cost. Right now no regular user has the technical ability to fiddle with a phone's laminated screen glued to a touch matrix paired with a fingerprint sensor and a camera, so we're alreay past the complexity threshold. But we could still reuse a screen block from phone A on phone B, except that's been forbidden by technical measures specially added to prevent it. The s…

It's absolutely about complexity. Complexity always allows companies to explain why they should be the only hands that touch something, lest a laymen fumbles it.

That's different. Most PR justification of anti-consumer behavior deliberately avoids what the topic is really about to control public perception... While complexity is what the PR campaign is about, it's still really about control and artificially creating new revenue streams.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#314

Post by moffkalast »

simplicio wrote: post #75
dkobia wrote: post #11

If all Boston Dynamics did was make Youtube videos, they'd have a pretty good business.

Is that their business? They've been around for 30+ years and I don't think they've ever successfully commercialized a product. So far as I can tell, they just hop from DARPA grant to DARPA grant and make cool videos of the results. I don't have any particular problem with that, but its a little weird? I figured they were a more traditional industrial robotics company that just did the humanoid robots as a side line…

Spot seems to be a genuine product for routine inspection now. By the looks of that promo video they have at least an extensive trial deployment at Chevron.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#315

Post by nebula8804 »

chasd00 wrote: post #277
nebula8804 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX has one for what I imagine is PR purposes. [1]: https://youtu.be/aajbFO7xwBM?t=36

They use flying drones all the time, you can see them flying around in the Starbase live streams. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that a flying drone can't do but spot would be able to do at Starbase. Unless Spot can crawl into a pipe or tank maybe.

Like I said, Spot can do one thing that the drones can't: Get more upvotes on his Twitter post showing how futuristic he is.

An oldie but a goodie, heres one of my favorite displays of how "ahead of the curve" Tesla is:

https://youtu.be/ib1KKHGYmLQ?t=1689

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#316

Post by moffkalast »

nirav72 wrote: post #255
1970-01-01 wrote: post #252

I would love to see how well it does the simple job of sweeping and cleaning floors with a broom and dust pan. This is such a wicked and non-trivial task that it would be a good indicator of overall progress.

Just 10 years ago, bi-pedal humanoid robots could barely walk untethered. If they could, like the Honda robot - even then they had limited mobility. So this is quite the progress. But yeah, it will be interesting to see if they can do mundane chores that require very little effort by humans.

Throwing more compute at MPPI controllers has been oddly successful, it'll just get more accurate over time with increasing samples on ever faster hardware.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#317

Post by threeseed »

Tarq0n wrote: post #148
neom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imho, Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?). I've been privileged enough to build in those countries for an extended period of time, and work with builders in many other countries. I strongly believe nobody bruit forces ideas into existence better than them, they make the resources happen in…

South Korean society and government are deeply co-opted by an oligopoly of wealthy families. While that leads to a great environment for safe investment, I'll gladly give it up for a more egalitarian society. You doubtlessly know more about life in South Korea than I do, but i found this video [0] and its sequel [1] very enlightening. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74&t=1050s 1: https://www.youtube.com/w…

To be fair the situation isn't that much better in most Western countries.

Murdoch family for example has huge influence in US, UK and Australia.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#318

Post by riversflow »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #60
snek_case wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate goal is to produce general-purpose robots. If we want robots that can do everything a human can, then legs are definitely useful. One simple example: getting in and out of a car. Another thing to consider is that a legged robot can tilt itself for balance while carrying heavy objects. To carry a similar weight with a wheeled robot you'll need a much wider wheel base. And then of course, if you want to bu…

In my opinion your argument assumes there would be a single form factor for robots that will be used everywhere. This assumption has generally been false for most technology, look at the different cars or personal computer. In my opinion, we will have as many kinds of robots as there are breeds of dogs, some of which will be bipedal, but most of them will make do with wheels.

> look at the different cars or personal computer.

this feels like a flawed example to me. ~100 years on and all cars are starting to look the same.[1] Personal computers, after like 30 years, have mostly converged around something that's essentially a 3x5 touchscreen with cameras on both sides. Sure, there are laptops and PC's, work and semi trucks, but that's 3 form factors? meh. Manufacturing at scale is much more efficient, and form follows function, can't really escape either.

[1]https://windingroad.com/articles/features/why-do-all-new-car...

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#319

Post by Teever »

antisthenes wrote: post #271
Tiereven wrote: post #264

As we enter an era of wide scale robotic deployment, we need to think long and hard about what the maintenance bottleneck will look like. We need to advocate now for reliable and open upgrades, replacement parts, service documentation, and diagnostics. Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing.

> Right to repair will be even more important for this technology than autos or general computing. It's going to be kneecapped far worse than phones or tractors. A general purpose humanoid robot is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple gps farming tractor or a cheap android phone. Companies will absolutely NOT want to give up that moat after developing such tech for 10-20 years.

I agree with this totally but it's a losing game.

The second someone releases a general purpose humanoid robot that is capable of self replication but is locked out from doing so with DRM the race will be on to break that DRM.

The self replicating humanoid robot will be a supreme game changer. It's a genie in the bottle that lets you wish for more wishes.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#320

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Karellen wrote: post #229
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm excited at the yet unexplored military applications.

You're excited... at the yet unexplored military applications... of humanity finding ever more efficient ways of killing each other? FML, that's dark.

War is already dark and more precision makes it less dark. Winning faster saves lives.
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