
Boston Dynamics Unleashes Wildcat, the Sprinting Quadruped Robot - upwardbound
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319706
======
chadwickthebold
They test this across the street from my office. Pretty crazy when you
actually see it sprint the length of a football field, turn around and run the
length again. Then again, it's also pretty funny when it faceplants and one of
the engineers runs over with a fire extinguisher to make sure it doesn't
explode.

~~~
jffry
One time, on my way to lunch at 200 Fifth Ave, I stopped at the top of the
hill by their parking lot and chuckled as their LS3 robot tried and failed to
stand up.

Also, one of them seems to be working on a pulse jet engine as a side project.
I heard the world's loudest vuvuzela, went over to check it out, and saw a guy
with a rocket engine strapped down to a concrete divider looking at a laptop.

~~~
chadwickthebold
Yeah, for two months I thought wildcat was just a really, really loud weed-
wacker that was used every single day.

------
joe_the_user
The odd thing is how we keep seeing these impressive prototypes and yet we
don't see the deployment of even the five-years-ago prototypes.

It's interesting to think about the factors that go into this. I could
imagine:

* High unit cost

* High maintenance cost, especially in remote locations.

* It is only useful _in_ remote locations where wheeled vehicles can't go.

* It requires special training to operate.

* It doesn't have enough intelligence to avoid obstacles by itself in the remote, rough locations it would otherwise be fit for.

Other ideas?

~~~
danbmil99
This is really core research, not product development. BD and Darpa spin it a
bit to keep the funding going, but having worked in this field my guess is we
are at least 15-20 years away from serious deployment of legged robotics in
the field.

That said, it's amazingly impressive what they have achieved.

I am curious as to why the robot's front legs are so close together in some
clips -- maybe approximating a 3-legged device was somehow algorithmically
simpler?

~~~
vapidResponse

      > why the robot's front legs are so close together
    

Hypothesis: The amount of force required to effect motion changes when you
form a small, tightly focused fulcrum, using two legs.

I'm thinking there's some kind of efficiency gained, where, to us, it looks
precarious and awkward, but to the machine-calculated algorithms, a trend is
detected, where it's easier to stay continuously balanced on a small point
while in motion, because it can use it's own inertia and apply smaller amounts
of torque and pressure to it's actuators, and use smaller movements, when
attempting to stay on it's feet.

When it's at rest, a wide stance is probably safest, but in motion, maybe it's
a different story. Given that it's a somewhat rigid machine, with appendages
that have alimited range of motion, maybe it targets, the smallest most
effective movements?

I would also wonder: What is the net energy consumed from it's power source,
to cycle one limb, moving it from fully contracted to fully extended and back
again? You would need to test this unloaded in free air, and completely loaded
under the weight of the entire robot at rest. And that test would not account
for the amount of work it would take to safely absorb the full weight ofthe
robot, while it's moving at 20MPH, to bring it to a full stop, with a single
limb.

I'm not sure if those sorts of efficiencies are anything more than a simple
practical concern in a prototype, given that the only goal is to run some
quick, untethered tests in a parking lot, but it might be relevant to a small
degree.

This is just my amateur guesswork, though.

~~~
trentmb
I see a lot of four legged animals run like that in assorted nature docs.

------
NatW
The updated Atlas may even be more-frightening:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6Okylclb8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6Okylclb8)

------
ihnorton
It doesn't just sprint; the thing _gallops_. Like a horse. Also, as it warms
up, it does a weird jitter-hop and walk-in-reverse thing that is just begging
for a remix to an electronic beat.

(Sometimes I miss Slashdot. This one deserves an 'overlords' reference).

------
bostonpete
Notice that there are no jokers trying to kick this thing over in the video.
Wildcat is much less forgiving than Big Dog. Three engineers have already been
mauled by it...

------
usaphp
Can someone explain me, why are they spending so much time on trying to make
it run instead of just fitting it with wheels? What is the benefit of it
having legs vs wheels? I must have missing something sorry...

~~~
vutekst
Legs can be better than wheels for rough terrain. Mules can go some places
jeeps can't.

~~~
usaphp
But what about caterpillar? They can go literally on any terrain. Even on Mars
:)

~~~
arm85
Have you seen where the european ibex goat can go on four legs?

~~~
forktheif
Seriously! Ibexes are insanely good climbers.

Random example
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmEPbA2R-s8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmEPbA2R-s8)

~~~
mkl
Insane is right: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT-
Ywtf23ho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT-Ywtf23ho)

~~~
JulianMorrison
Their parkour is superior.

------
clarkmoody
I'm waiting for the demo of a robot placing accurate shots at full-auto with a
standard issue rifle -- on multiple targets.

~~~
SEJeff
Accurate gunners NEVER fire on fully auto. When I was the commander's gunner
behind a .50 cal cruising in a humvee around Baghdad and (more often) Mosul,
Iraq... You fire controlled 8-10 round bursts or 3-5 round bursts if you
aren't trying to go nuts.

Perfect aim and fully auto are mutually exclusive. That is why the M16A1,
which was used in Vietnam as the standard issue rifle, was replaced with the
no longer fully auto M16A2. The A2 has safe, fire, and 3 round burst. The
fully auto selector was removed as soldiers just wasted a lot of ammo and
burned up barrels.

~~~
mbell
I believe that is the point. A human doesn't have the timing/strength to
accurately shoot in full auto, a robot possibly can.

~~~
jonmrodriguez
The robot still wouldn't want to shoot on auto. It might shoot as fast as
auto, but it would want to decide & control when each round goes off, rather
than rely on the fixed timing of the auto mechanism

------
robomartin
In a different thread there was an argument about the relative futility of
some of today's robotics experiments [0]. As it is sometimes typical on HN,
the poster with a message outside the "go team" cargo-cult mentality wasn't
very welcome. I happen to think he had a very interesting point. And that
point translates well into this thread.

Why don't we see practical applications of all of these robotics experiments?
The answer is very simple really: Most of them are relatively pointless and
add very little to the robotics knowledge-base that will be needed to really
move robotics forward into real-world applied robots.

Think of something like robotics vacuum cleaners. Nothing whatsoever
innovative about any of them. It's a wheeled platform that has been in use in
hobby and research robotics since, well, forever. The '70's and '80's were
full of robots with this basic platform. What changed? Electronics got better,
batteries smaller, microprocessors more capable, manufacturing more efficient.
What was retained and reused from prior research? Probably not much.

I started in college with the goal of becoming a robotics engineer. An EE with
specialization in robotics. It didn't take long for me to realize that the
field wasn't as interesting and exciting as I made it out to be in my mind.
The R2D2's and C3-PO's were nowhere to be found and were easily decades away
from becoming reality. If I wanted to be in robotics I would end-up making
industrial manipulators or things with motors that we would all pretend were
robots. That's a pet peeve of mine. Battlebots had nothing whatsoever to do
with robotics. It was about a bunch of remote controlled machines. Not robots.

I digress. The point is that I was really excited about the field until I
realized what I wanted to do would have to wait 50 or 100 years. I wanted to
work on Commander Data, not a mindless pick-and-place machine.

And so I begun to dissect things and think about what it would take to get
there. Do we learn anything by making humanoid-looking little robots out of RC
servos? I built a couple. It's an utter waste of time. Nothing whatsoever of
value other than to pretend we built a humanoid. Don't get me wrong, it's a
great hobby and lots of fun for the kids to learn, but it is far, far away
from anything even remotely useful.

In my opinion these are the areas that need a quantum leap in development
before robots like Wildcat can become useful and relevant outside the lab:

ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES

This is huge. Motors, gears, springs, pistons and bladders just don't cut it.
We need a step change in the performance and capabilities of what we use to do
the job of biological muscles. Machines like Wildcat can't operate for days at
a time. They use internal combustion engines to power pumps and hydraulic or
pneumatic end-effectors to actuate joints. This is lousy. Very little can be
learned from trying to operate such machines. You end-up with things like
Asimo that walk like they are taking a dump because it is nearly impossible to
implement true dynamic gaits because we either can't implement enough degrees
of freedom or joint actuation simply isn't up to par.

Artificial muscles that perform well and are energy efficient would
revolutionize the field.

ENERGY STORAGE

Thankfully this is something robotics shares with electric cars. We need to do
much better than current LiPo cells allow in terms of volumetric power density
(at the very least).

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE + CONTROL SYSTEMS

This is a field that has seen advances but is nowhere near where it needs to
be. I can teach a five year old kid how to sort and fold a pile of clothes
without much effort (other than maintaining his or her attention). It would be
very hard to do the same with the AI we have mastered to date. I am talking
about having a couple of robot arms and a camera presented with a random pile
of clothes and having those clothes sorted and properly folded as a human
would. No special mechanics, suction mechanisms or anything like that.

PROCESSING / NEURAL COMPUTING

The AI+CONTROL field ultimately needs far more advanced and energy efficient
processing architectures than are commonly available today. Stuffing a robot
with a powerful Linux PC provides nowhere near the processing bandwidth needed
to perform at a level comparable to a human child. I am not sure what form
this step improvement in computing will take, but we need it.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES / DEVELOPMENT AND SIMULATION TOOLS

We are in the dark ages. We need a serious paradigm shift in the way we
program computers if we are ever going to even approach something that can
compare to the fictional C3-PO or Commander Data ideas.

If you want to contribute to robotics your time and efforts would be far
better spent on the above (I am sure there are other areas I have not listed)
rather than making little remote-controlled gyro-actuated cubes that link to
each other via magnets. I don't know what can be learned from that other than
making remote-controlled gyro-actuated little cubes that link together via
magnets. Cool toy. Useless for the advancement of robotics. It's almost like
spending a lot of time playing chess: You become better at playing chess, a
narrow skill, and virtually nothing you do can be translated or reused for
other tasks outside of chess. Grandmasters are not genius thinkers, they are
simply great chess players and that's it. Master little cubes with gyros and
that's all you've mastered.

I have two German Shepherd dogs. I have trained both of them to search for
objects I hide anywhere in the house. I show them the object, I let them smell
it and then hide the object while they wait in a "sit-stay" well out of sight.
Sometimes I'll hide the object deep in a drawer inside a closet in an upstairs
bedroom while they wait in the garage with the door closed. These dogs are
amazing to watch. They always find what I showed them. Every so often they
need a little help (and they ask for it), most of the time they do it on their
own. Think about all that is required for an animal to do this spanning a
range of capabilities from cognition, perception, sensing, navigation,
planning, communications and more.

There is no way a bunch of little blocks or a gasoline-hydraulic-powered
machine is helping us advance towards even something as simple, in terms of
biological beings, as finding an hidden object using smell. A better place to
spend money and resources is in the areas I highlighted above and others I did
not mention. Once you "ace" the above, the process of designing and
fabricating a mechanical frame with the required capabilities should be an
almost academic exercise for any engineer with a moderate range of experience
in the electromechanical fields.

Not to minimize Boston Dynamic, but I really think a lot of what they and
others are doing is simply burning tax money for no good reason. Well, there
is a good reason. The government folks who shovel out the money are easily
impressed by this stuff. Nothing really advances but it is impressive as hell.
Who knows how much money was burned on the GE walker in the 1960's [1]. I
don't know of anything that came out of that project and is in use today. If I
gave any reasonably capable team of engineers a few million dollars to play
--without a requirement to actually deliver something that works in the real
world-- they could build similarly capable machines. There's nothing special
about these systems other than they are impressive to the untrained eye.

General Electric built quadrupeds in 1968 [1]. The only reason they didn't
perform like the Boston Dynamics rigs is that they did not have access to
better computing platforms, sensors and electronics. There is nothing in the
Boston Dynamics machines in terms of mechanics or hydraulics that was not
available or could not be implemented in 1968. Just look at the video [2] (got
to love the sound effects). This machine, all by itself, proves my point about
the futility of some of this research. They all put the cart in front of the
horse. The GE machine needed better effectors, sensors, energy storage, AI and
control. The machine shows the amazing mechanical complexity that was
attainable in 1968. Remember, no Solidworks, no microprocessors, no FPGA's, no
Linux, just a dude pulling levers. Amazing stuff.

We are simply focusing on and throwing money at the wrong things.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495440)

[1]
[http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/Image.Archive...](http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/Image.Archive/other.robots/Mosher.GE.walking.truck.jpg)

[2]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGCFLEYakM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGCFLEYakM)

EDIT:

Just came across this, which is really cool (1957):

[http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=8392](http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=8392)

~~~
tlb
Current batteries appear to be inadequate because walking robots are so
inefficient. Mine took 3000 watts to walk. ASIMO is similar. But humans
require only 200 watts to run. Delivering 200 watts for 12 hours (Ironman-
level endurance) takes 25 lbs of lithium batteries, which is the same ballpark
as the weight of the human cardiovascular + digestive system.

~~~
robomartin
Right, and that's why the first item on my list are artificial muscles. If we
had efficient, pliable, moldable, rugged, strong artificial muscles robotics
would make a step change for the better overnight.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
I'm sure there's significant opportunity to increase efficiency by combined
improvement in the structure and control software.

Have you tried to learn a balance sport like skateboarding, snowboarding,
skiing, etc? As a beginner you aren't capable of the prediction/anticipation
necessary to position yourself precisely for dynamic stability. You overcome
this largely by bracing multiple muscles against each other.

But once you practice enough that your brain understands and anticipates,
everything suddenly feels much more effortless. A beginning snowboarder will
burn through to muscle fatigue limits in just a couple hours on the bunny
hill. An experience snowboarder can ride the steeps all day with only mild
fatigue. Sure, there's likely to be a difference in physical conditioning too,
but in my experience that's a lessor factor than simply knowing/feeling how to
move the minimum amount at the precisely right moment.

So while a revolutionary advance in artificial muscles would be grand, I think
there still may be significant opportunities with existing actuators.

------
MarcusBrutus
I am not convinced that that's the way to go. I know nothing about robotics
but it seems to me that research into a chimp-donkey hybrid might have more
potential for success and also for producing lasting results and solve real,
elementary problems that will be relevant for future generations (also with a
better chance for civilian / medical applications). The intelligence of a
primate to allow it to obey simple commands and follow his master and the
agility, biological power source and millions of years of evolution of a
donkey or some other sturdy quadruped that can negotiate rough terrain.

Not to mention that with a biological "robot" you also have a very low cost of
producing subsequent units if you manage to create a non-sterile hybrid.

------
whatfor
Is this thing been developed to kill humans?

~~~
Game_Ender
DARPA is funding the early development of technology they think will some day
be useful to the military. Similar to how the DARPA Grand/Urban challenges
helped plant the seed for fully autonomous ground vehicles.

So this specific robot is not meant to kill humans, but a robot in the future
based on it's technology might. Currently the military has a large aversion
lethal autonomous systems, so I don't think it's going to happen.

~~~
whatfor
_Currently the military has a large aversion lethal autonomous systems_

Humm... what about the drones?

~~~
potatolicious
The drones aren't autonomous - they are remote-piloted. Think of them like R/C
aircraft... that kill. In any case, all "trigger pulling" is done by a human.

The military, as of yet, has had an aversion to robots that can decide to pull
the trigger on their own.

~~~
whatfor
Thanks for clarifying.

------
wyclif
It's only a matter of time until one of these things kills a person.

~~~
VladRussian2
the flying versions of these things are already killing. Or do you mean a
robot/drone killing at their own will?

------
lispm
Looks like it is hard to stop the military-industrial complex. Don't say you
have not been warned.

------
vapidResponse
Time to protect rocket propelled grenades, recoilless rifles and H.E.A.T.
ammunition under the 2nd amendment. The robot apocalypse is nigh.

(...I'm only half joking)

~~~
jonmrodriguez
Continuing the half-joke:

A safer idea is for people to build EMPs, since they have much less potential
to be used to hurt humans compared to the heavy weapons you mention.

I don't know how effective it is, but I've heard that one way to get the high
instantaneous power need for an EMP is to use a potato cannon to fire a very
large cylindrical permanent magnet through a wire coiled thousands of times
around the cannon barrel. I haven't seen any video proof of this idea though,
so take it with a grain of salt.

------
001sky
Interesting how they use a petrol engine.

~~~
joelthelion
I wonder if the engine is used to power an electrical generator, or if the
mechanical energy is used directly?

~~~
tlb
It mainly runs a hydraulic pump.

------
JulianMorrison
I wonder if Boston Dynamics understands how intensely viscerally creepy their
prototypes are.

~~~
DanBC
I wonder if they purposely design that in. Imagine one of those, with a gun,
chasing you.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Or just a high explosive charge. Slamhound?

------
stock_toaster
I am rooting for a LandStrider model.

------
johnzim
Can't wait till Sean Vanaman finds out about this one...

~~~
DoggettCK
Somewhere in San Francisco, Jake Rodkin is huddled, weeping under a bed.

------
JDDunn9
This doesn't seem like it will do much to advance robotics in the private
sector (wheels are fine). I'm more excited to see more results from the DARPA
arm program ([http://www.gizmag.com/irobot-darpa-autonomous-robotic-
manipu...](http://www.gizmag.com/irobot-darpa-autonomous-robotic-manipulation-
program/27350/)) and the Velo gripper
([https://willowgarage.com/velo2g](https://willowgarage.com/velo2g)).

~~~
MechSkep
_(wheels are fine)_

I disagree with this. Try constraining yourself to a wheelchair for a week or
so, and then tell me nothing can be gained from a good set of legs.

~~~
JDDunn9
Most robots would be confined to one store/space. Especially considering legs
double the cost, likelihood of failing, complexity, etc.

~~~
DasIch
I doubt that applies to the robots the military would like to have.

