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An electric new era for Atlas

bostondynamics.com

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Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#331

Post by wepple »

Intralexical wrote: post #324
robinhoode wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hypothetical deployment but it's reasonable to expect. These robots will be very valuable, and everyone will want one. It's not going to become a housemaid in a few years. But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. Moravec's paradox is still in play, but advancement in AI chips will slowly overcome it.

> But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. What can humanoid robots making car parts do, that the already-existing and already widely deployed robots making car parts can't?

Re-tool an entire factory overnight in response to a change in design of the car, or in fact to produce airplanes instead

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#332

Post by jonplackett »

benjijay wrote: post #172

That first video of the bot standing from the floor and turning towards the camera one joint at a time does something strange to the uncanny valley horror movie part of my brain.

I am really confused by their intentions with this video. Are they trying to freak us out? If so, succeeded!

But I would have thought they’d rather not have us experience atlas as some kind of freakish terminator mixed with the girl from the ring.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#333

Post by LeifCarrotson »

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.

Literally standing in front of a proprietary Fanuc industrial 6-axis arm waiting for Roboguide at the moment... this is already a wide scale industry and shows low probability to trend towards open and repairable technology.

There have been some efforts for vendor-agnostic robot software like RoboDK and other warehouse execution systems, but the default is proprietary vendor software.

It would be nice for society if this were true, but we'd need someone to exist whose complementary technology was robotics who found it worth commoditizing the entire ecosystem against their will. Or regulators who weren't entirely beholden to industry lobbyists.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#334

Post by joshspankit »

sparky_z wrote: post #228
the_biot wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... a rendered video, i.e. it doesn't exist.

This doesn't look like a rendered video to me at all. I'm not enough of an expert to point to specific reasons, but the lighting, reflections, shadows, etc just seem 100% real to me. I feel it in my gut. You apparently disagree? Was there something in the video you think marks it out as CGI? Or do we just have differing gut instincts about it?

> the lighting, reflections, shadows, etc just seem 100% real to me. I feel it in my gut.

I’m the exact opposite. My gut says it’s rendered. The graininess, the odd chromatic aberrations, the shadows that are too clean, the “head” being way too physically clean (like if the modellers got sloppy with the thousands of pieces), something odd about the fps of the robot vs the fos of the background, and there’s something odd about the physics of how it gets up (yes, beyond it’s horror-movie sequence)

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#335

Post by rozap »

kaba0 wrote: post #329
serf wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you materially affect a half-century old internal combustion engine? Sure. Can you do so after decades of miniaturization/optimization, to make it as efficient as they are today? Mobiles are similar, they are filled to the brim with various electronics, connected together into a huge mash. why would you even expect to fix that?

This is a bad analogy because the hardware in engines of today is actually not that different or hard to work on fundamentally, but manufacturers do intentionally lock down software to make diagnostics very tricky. They became more efficient and complex, but people still hack on even the most modern engines, usually by tossing the OEM software.

Aftermarket ECUs (even the open source ones like rusEFI and speeduino) show that you can actually do the stuff required to make modern engines go vroom, but manufacturers have no desire to make that process easy out of the box.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#336

Post by jiminymcmoogley »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #202
Isamu wrote: post #73

The success of old Atlas was partly due to the compactness and high power of hydraulic actuators. There’s a lot of actuators to pack into a humanoid robot and it takes a lot of power to do backflips. I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.

They did say it’s for commercial use. Probably for warehouses and such where sadly backflipping is not relevant

see what i find puzzling is that warehouses have flat floors right? so what benefit does the upfront cost of building something with a bunch of extra actuators for all the joints in 2 legs, and the ongoing running costs of far less mechanically efficient bipedal locomotion have over wheeled movement like their other robot, the Handle, offers? i should mention i know nothing about robots so i'm sure there must be a good reason for it, but this thought has been on my mind ever since I saw george hotz bring it up in the Comma Body reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhvt0ZmqmGQ as a layperson, i feel like biomimicry only makes sense for hands and arms, at least for the vast majority of commercial use cases

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#337

Post by Ralfp »

e12e wrote: post #323

> This journey will start with Hyundai Wonder if that includes weapon systems? https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp > With its cutting-edge unmanned and automated weapons systems, Hyundai WIA upgraded the level of defense industry system.

In late 2022 they made a pledge together with few other companies to don't weaponize their robots tech:

https://www.axios.com/2022/10/06/boston-dynamics-pledges-wea...

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#338

Post by ok_dad »

wepple wrote: post #331
Intralexical wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But will they be making car parts? Almost certainly. What can humanoid robots making car parts do, that the already-existing and already widely deployed robots making car parts can't?

Re-tool an entire factory overnight in response to a change in design of the car, or in fact to produce airplanes instead

I don’t think you understand how hard it is to retool and rearrange a factory.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#339

Post by Solvency »

jonplackett wrote: post #332
benjijay wrote: post #172

That first video of the bot standing from the floor and turning towards the camera one joint at a time does something strange to the uncanny valley horror movie part of my brain.

I am really confused by their intentions with this video. Are they trying to freak us out? If so, succeeded! But I would have thought they’d rather not have us experience atlas as some kind of freakish terminator mixed with the girl from the ring.

[flagged]

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#340

Post by ok_dad »

tivert wrote: post #55

The VCs said "don't be afraid," AI wasn't going to be Skynet. Rather it would a tool that would bring about a utopia of human flourishing. But it was always going to be Skynet. I bet the next version will have teeth.

AI and robots like this may be how the wealthy will replace the problematic plebeians.
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