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An electric new era for Atlas

bostondynamics.com

341–350 of 443 posts

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#341
post #16

Figure, a new startup, is working on a similar humanoid robot. They just raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft [1]. Not sure about their chances of succeeding. On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful. 1- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...

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 Korea is a bit different in some interesting ways. The South Korean economy is dominated by a small number of "chaebols", which are massive corporate conglomerates that tend to be owned and controlled by an oligarchic family. Samsung, for instance, is owned by the Lee family. These families also tend to have a ton of political influence. The government has, for decades, embraced an explicit policy of developing the chaebols via industrial policy. So, as you can imagine, you end up with a situation where the chaebols and their owners have lots of political power. Not exactly the kind of free market capitalism that someone like Milton Friedman would endorse, but it seems to be effective in its own way.

There's a flip side to South Korea's chaebol-centric economy, however. South Korea's national security situation is extremely dangerous, so in fact one of the reasons for the industrial policy has been to maintain a domestic defense industrial base so that they aren't dependent on arms imports from Western countries. Accordingly, most of the South Korean chaebols have a significant presence in the arms industry. In recent years, this sector has expanded, with South Korea becoming one of the world's leading arms exporters.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#342
post #9

Figure, a new startup, is working on a similar humanoid robot. They just raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft [1]. Not sure about their chances of succeeding. On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful. 1- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...

It's not the only one, but it's the one that's raised the most capital. This "robots + AI" space is heating up just as fast as LLMs, and every country seems to have a dozen startups in the ring. Here is just a sample: https://www.1x.tech/androids/neo https://rainbow-robotics.com/en_main?_l=en https://sanctuary.ai/ https://www.tesla.com/AI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CToL2qkCd8g (funny) https://www.reddit.com/r/sin…

A while ago I made a blog post collecting 20+ efforts for humanoid robots specifically. There has been a real explosion in humanoid announcements in the past few months and it's hard to keep up even if you follow the news.

https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-...

Edit: Haha, case in point. I opened Twitter and sure enough there's a new announcement of a humanoid robot today, from Intel/Mobileye: https://twitter.com/AmnonShashua/status/1780611499133685889

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Boston Dynamics needs a sugar daddy to subsidize them. First it was DARPA. Then Google. Now Hyundai. Their real achievement is that their management has been able to keep the money flowing for three decades.

boston dynamics is a govt psyop whose sole purpose as a company is to familiarize society with seeing robots before for the military & police industrial complex uses them to control us.

it's quite literally succeeding at it in front of our faces.

this is why their core product is video demos laced with cynical terror disguised as humorous pop culture references.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#344
post #338
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m saying if you have a collection of humanoids and general purpose tooling, you can adapt much faster.

I don’t literally mean retool a conventional production line in one night

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#346
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could they have come up with a more terrifying way for it to standup? I can't think of one.

I think this is on purpose to show the extra freedom of movements of the new model compared to the hydraulic one.

Also, it can get up off the ground by itself. I don't think I ever saw any of the previous Atlas robots doing that, and it's an important feature, since the primary failure mode of a bipedal robot is falling down.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Stairs.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#348
post #16

Figure, a new startup, is working on a similar humanoid robot. They just raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft [1]. Not sure about their chances of succeeding. On the other hand, as a non-American, I admire that the USA is seemingly the only place where people get funding for wonky ideas that sometimes become very successful. 1- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/robot-startup-figure-valued-...

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…

Japan, the country whose GDP hasn't grown in 30 years, has 0 major tech companies, still uses fax machines for everything, and has numerous stagnant, conglomerates/trusts/monopolies, does capitalism really well? I feel like this comment comes from another planet.

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boston Dynamics needs a sugar daddy to subsidize them. First it was DARPA. Then Google. Now Hyundai. Their real achievement is that their management has been able to keep the money flowing for three decades.

boston dynamics is a govt psyop whose sole purpose as a company is to familiarize society with seeing robots before for the military & police industrial complex uses them to control us. it's quite literally succeeding at it in front of our faces. this is why their core product is video demos laced with cynical terror disguised as humorous pop culture references.

A govt psyop wholly owned by a Korean conglomerate?

Re: An electric new era for Atlas

#350
post #337
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...

Isn't Spot already used in defense/anti-terror capacity?

Ed: apparently the pledge came after Hyundai took control?

https://bostondynamics.com/news/hyundai-motor-group-complete...

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