
No big deal, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas can perform backflips now - hourislate
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16667376/boston-dynamics-atlas-backflip-video-watch
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tfolbrecht
Why are so many users in the comments on here fear mongering? Don't you
understand we already have dumb solutions for killing and making war? Bombs,
bullets, Chemical and biological weapons, non of which need a complex robotic
platform. How will human shaped robots change anything when we can build
flying, hovering grenades and mass deploy them with COTS components?

You know what does need a complex platform like Atlas? Disaster Rescue,
Medicine, Telepresence, Automation etc

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11thEarlOfMar
To get an idea of progress, here's state of the art 10 years ago. Note that
the actuators are pneumatic pistons, not direct drive motors (very hard to
control, springy like muscles):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwpIQMUikU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXwpIQMUikU)

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viewtransform
Does anyone know what breakthroughs in control systems have gone into making
this possible ? Are there any papers describing how Boston Dynamics is
programming this ? are they hardcoding the backflip from human data and then
overlaying some stability code ? or is the backflip entirely generated by the
underlying controls ?

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jakelarkin
I still wonder why Google sold Boston Dynamics, and no other transportation or
defense manufacturer scooped them up. The technology certainly looks amazing.
Are the commercialization prospects really that bad?

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ajross
The video is amazing, but let's be honest: fluid motion without falling is
something you can expect from a minimum wage employee. And big robots are
physical machines that are likely to cost rather more than a minimum wage
scrub to hire/acquire and pay/maintain.

This is a different world from, say, machine learning. It's equally true that
we're just now reaching the point where ML is as good as we are at recognizing
photos of our children or transcribing our voice mail. But those ML algorithms
can be deployed at cloud scale for pennies, so it's worthwhile where physical
things aren't yet.

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melling
Who said their market was to replace minimum wage workers?

You made that up then tried to convince us that it’s a bad idea.

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ajross
I did no such thing. I said their market was _not_ billion-plus consumer
applications as the case with much ML research, and that this might explain
some of the lack of commercial interest mentioned upthread.

I won't take a position as to whether this robot is a "bad idea". But pretty
much anyone can see that (relative to the problem difficulty) it's a "worse
idea" than, say, photo recognition.

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mstade
As a former gymnast I can confirm that is indeed a backflip. Pretty good one
at that!

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muxator
In the last animation the robot extends its legs after being already on the
ground.

Failing to see a physic justification for it, I wonder how much of these
movements is the result of a predefined "script".

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yodon
The Boston Dynamics robot is extending its legs to return to both a fully
stable state and its optimal “home” or resting position state.

As to the question of whether the robot is following a ‘predefined “script”’
(implying, I think, that the developers might have “cheated”) if it were easy
to make a “predefined script” that let a robot do this kind of thing, it would
have been done years ago. Stability of complex dynamical systems is an
incredibly hard problem, and without real active stability control there’s no
way to get a thousand pound robot to balance like this. There’s no cheating
involved, they simply did the hard things and made them look easy.

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wmf
Yeah, here's the competition:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE)
Not even close.

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nopinsight
This is a kind of AI/Robotics research that should be regulated. In 10-20
years, they will be quieter, cheaper, and even more capable.

How much resistance do we have against a horde of robotic raptors carrying
weapons?

If you disagree, please state why instead of downvoting silently because this
is a serious issue and we ought to have rational discussions about it.

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joaomacp
> How much resistance do we have against a horde of robotic raptors carrying
> weapons?

Atlas would suck against self-flying grenade-dropping drones.

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matt_wulfeck
I wonder if they’ll start to model the robots “strength” after ratios found in
humans. I thought its movement was squarely in the uncanny valley, at least
partly because its muscle were probably way stronger than what a human could
do.

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PhasmaFelis
I wonder. Combining strength, speed, precision, and range of motion in a small
package can be tricky, and requires trade-offs. It may be no stronger than it
needs to be to perform the motions we're seeing.

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acjohnson55
Fast forward to me being a minor pawn in the resistance, running through the
woods from heavily armed Atlas droids.

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lmilcin
It's not the backflips that is fascinating to me. It's how human it looks.

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krapp
Wow. America's future murder machines really are getting spritely.

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tyingq
The dog like one is more chilling to me.

[https://youtu.be/kgaO45SyaO4](https://youtu.be/kgaO45SyaO4)

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obilgic

      video
      paragraph
      gif
      sentence
      gif
      sentence 
      gif

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zachsnow
It's a multi-paragraph description of a video that takes longer (and is far
more boring) to read than watch. And there are choppy gifs illustrating the
paragraphs narrating the video.

I don't understand why this is being done. Presumably it increases engagement?

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unixhero
So you can watch it at work without "sitting down" and watching a video. And
you also don't need a headset.

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ttul
How long before we see Atlas jumping from roof tops in Hong Kong?

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DKnoll
The question is how long you live to te...

LOST CARRIER

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nickm12
These videos are always mindblowing to me, but I rarely see anyone ask "how
many failures did it take to make the video?" There's a huge difference
between this being a 99% performance and a 1% performance.

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visarga
They should do it on stage.

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neo4sure
Wow awesome awesome. Why did Google sell this to softbank?

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nikanj
Google does not want to become an arms dealer

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neo4sure
This might be googles IBM moment.

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joering2
LA council just passed approval for armed police drones. When I look at Atlas,
I'm prod how far technology is coming and I am not afraid of this machine; but
I am afraid of what our government will eventually do with them.

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adventured
The LA council did not just approve armed police drones.

They're approved strictly for surveillance purposes. It specifically forbids
any weapons capability.

"A drone would not be used with any weapons capabilities, including any non-
lethal or less-than-lethal systems, according to the proposed guidelines."

[http://www.dailynews.com/2017/10/17/amid-protests-la-
police-...](http://www.dailynews.com/2017/10/17/amid-protests-la-police-
commission-to-consider-letting-department-use-drones/)

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/lapd-drones-set-to-be-
deploy...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/lapd-drones-set-to-be-deployed-by-
los-angeles-police-department.html)

