Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Extreme parkour with legged robots

extreme-parkour.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 195 posts

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#61

Post by bee_rider »

beambot wrote: post #55
nightpool wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I think it's important to understand that this type of robotics research requires serious ethical considerations no matter where it happens or who works on it—this work specifically was funded by the US military, but it applies just as equally to weaponization projects happening within China.

Does the Chinese military sponsor education for US Citizens on military-adjacent projects in China? Why (not)?

I assume some combination of: they don’t have the same incentives to try and draw in international talent as the multicultural US does, and US k-12 schools don’t produce students that would do well on their admissions tests or whatever. Also we have pretty good engineering schools here in the US, so I don’t see why anyone would take them up on that offer if they decided to make it.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#62

Post by dclowd9901 »

fuelfive wrote: post #18
nightpool wrote: post #3

As a reminder: CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense, and although there are certainly civilian applications for this technology, one of the most likely short-term applications is improving legged drones for battlefield deployment (often, it should be said, in humanitarian roles, including search and rescue, or support roles, such as ammo, food, and water resupply, bu…

Glad to see our universities making progress in this important area of national security.

What a naive statement. Do you really believe no other nation is capable of making such a thing? This doesn’t improve our national security at all. Just ups the ante for robotic infantry, whatever the hell that ends up meaning. Like advancements in war technology has ever been a positive in the world.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#63

Post by autoexec »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #6

This gives me Black Mirror-fueled nightmares... not least because those videos suggest that a Black Mirror scenario may not be that far off and what probably saves us for now is battery capacity.

"More Black Mirror than Mirror's Edge" was my takeaway too. In terms of Parkour this is slow and awkward, but it's like watching a baby taking their first steps towards murder. The most important hurdle for many soldiers is the one these machines never needed the help of AI to get over. Even after dehumanizing the enemy many soldiers are "non-firers" and won't shoot another person even if their own life is in danger, while those who kill children and civilians are often haunted by that act.

These robots won't have any problems pulling the trigger at anyone or anything. They won't hesitate or refuse an order the way Stanislav Petrov did. They won't be trained to have empathy or respect for life. Humanity is the final check against the worst atrocities war demands from the people we send out to kill each other, and devices like these solve that "problem" by dehumanizing the soldier.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#64

Post by gumby »

croes wrote: post #48
gumby wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are vehicles that can navigate terrain a wheeled vehicle cannot. So they could do anything from operate as pack "animals" for infiltration teams to be armed drones that creep along the ground, harder to detect than a flying one.

Once again, how does this improve national security? That's offense not defense. It worsens the national security of your opponent but doesn't strengthen your own.

That seems like a rather limited view of the word "defense", more appropriate to football or hockey than warfare. Even for that you could have these drones patrolling the territory/shooting intruders.

But the word "defense" is much wider than that. Is the US supplying offensive weapons to Ukraine contributing to the national defense? Even if you feel the US should not be doing that, I hoe you can see the logic of people who do frame it that way.

And Ukraine's in a defensive war against an invader, and for that they have to go on the offense.

(Of course the US renaming the Department of War to Department of Defense in 1947 was 100% propaganda, or to be more charitable, aspirational. There is no question that it has been used offensively).

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#66

Post by blacksmith_tb »

roenxi wrote: post #51
fuelfive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see our universities making progress in this important area of national security.

This tech is the stuff of nightmares. People are going to see this unfeeling little chitinous bug-dog-thing crawling in with them, then they die. And it is making it cheaper to kill people in exotic foreign lands. This is the tragedy of the commons. I'd rather see nobody making these advances, but if someone has to it'd better be people on my side. Can't stop progress :(

Maybe there's a glimmer of hope that someday both sides can send their robots to destroy one another, instead of their sons and daughters? I agree that initially there's an advantage to richer nations, but it's not like a $30M jet fighter, there could be parity.

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#68

Post by gpderetta »

alcover wrote: post #39

"The Hound half rose in its kennel and looked at him with green-blue neon light flickering in its suddenly activated eyebulbs. It growled again."

  "THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel."

Re: Extreme parkour with legged robots

#70

Post by ChuckMcM »

nightpool wrote: post #3

As a reminder: CMU and its robotics program is intimately associated with the US Department of Defense, and although there are certainly civilian applications for this technology, one of the most likely short-term applications is improving legged drones for battlefield deployment (often, it should be said, in humanitarian roles, including search and rescue, or support roles, such as ammo, food, and water resupply, bu…

You say that like it is a bad thing. :-)

Fun fact, in the mid-80's early 90's the "industry" was "getting ahead" of the Department of Defense in terms of capabilities that could be deployed in an adversarial way. One of the most visible outcomes was the first crypto wars. (source code became ITAR controlled, emailing a perl script that implemented the RSA algorithm to someone outside the country was an ITAR violation, and we joking suggested illegal immigrants get that code tattooed on their body so that it would be illegal to deport them without a license from the Dept. Of Commerce)

Getting an inertial navigation unit w/sensors that weighed less than 10kg (22 lbs) was code word level secret stuff, because beyond the line of sight missiles are a thing.

Anyway. the US DoD (like the defense departments everywhere) realized they needed to be more engaged with R&D labs if only to see what progress they were making so that they could anticipate whether or not that progress might show up as a threat in some way. On the plus side that freed up some money that would have been in black budgets for universities that were doing similar research anyway and as a funder, the source, in this case the DoD, generally gets a non-exclusive perpetual right to use any resulting IP out of that sort of funding arrangement, even when patented.

Bottom line, researchers are gonna research, so make sure what the future holds is not gonna show up unexpectedly on the battlefield or in other covert ways.

All that said, as someone who has been involved in building this "scale" of robot (under 1m, self powered) the progress has been freakin' unbelievable. In part because of the fact that you can put a supercomputer on one that weighs less than 500 g and runs for 8 hours on a battery that weighs less than 1 kg. Sensors, video, real time image processing. All pretty stunning.

The Ukranian use of off the shelf drones, and their rapid development of weaponized "drone munitions" tells me that the DoD is correct in wanting to keep track of what is going on with robots that can do "extreme parkour."

Post reply on HN