
The Golden Age of Walking Bots That Never Arrived - jonbaer
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a20123/boston-dyanamics-google-sale/
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Animats
It's not that bad. The DARPA humanoid competition reminds me of the first
DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles. Not the one in 2005, the first
one in 2004. I was there, and it was embarrassing. I wrote a post-mortem. with
pictures.[1] Here's how it went:

\- CMU: Their vehicle was preprogrammed, not autonomous. Teams got a CD with
the route, as GPS coordinates and a path width, 2 hours before the event. They
had a trailer with workstations on site, and their large staff manually
planned out the route using aerial photos. The vehicle had little or no
automated obstacle avoidance. But DARPA's staff was too smart to fall for
that. The competition manager (an active duty USMC colonel) had soldiers out
the night before the event moving some of the obstacles. CMU's vehicle made it
7.4 miles and then plowed through a solid sheet metal fence, went off course,
got stuck on a berm, and spun a wheel until a tire caught fire.

\- Caltech: went off course and through a fence, and couldn't find a way back
through the fence.

\- SciAutonics II: went into an embankment and got stuck.

\- Team DAD: stuck at a football-sized rock.

\- TerraMax: in the preliminaries at the California Motor Speedway, plowed
into a parked car set out as an obstacle and continued to push the car until
remotely disabled.

\- Virginia Tech, Axion, CajunBot, Palos Verdes High School, Blue Team, and
Ensco: couldn't get out of the starting area.

\- TerraHawk - didn't make it to the starting area.

That was 2004, which was so bad it was covered by the Comedy Channel. In 2005,
there were 23 teams, and every vehicle worked better than any of the 2004
vehicles. Five vehicles finished the 132 mile course. Suddenly, autonomous
vehicles were a real thing.

That was what I was expecting for the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. The first one
was awful, and that was expected. But I expected to see improvement each year
until there was full success.

Instead, Google bought most of the players and, it now seems, accomplished
nothing with them. This does not speak well for Google. If you care about what
you're doing, you probably don't want to sell your company to Alphabet.

[1]
[http://www.overbot.com/grandchallenge/note45.html](http://www.overbot.com/grandchallenge/note45.html)

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apalmer
Two things:

1) of all the animals that move around freely on this planet, i think bipedal
walking is amongst the rarest mode of transportation, i mean you got many
animals that can go bipedal for short bursts but outside of that you got
basically humans and birds... and for birds in general bipedalism is the
secondary mode of locamotion... just seems illogical to spend so much effort
to develop what is clearly a very limited and complex mode of operation.

also if as the article surmises google had any expectation that they were
going to invest in robotics R&D and get some significant new product out of it
in 5 years time... well then they deserved to get burned... some problems just
always fall on the government and military in particular because of the
timespans involved before something meaningful can sprout from the R&D
efforts.

~~~
x1798DE
I agree that there are easier modes of movement than bipedal motion, but to
some extent bipedal motion is useful because human environments are designed
for human-like motion.

That said, cats and dogs seem to do just fine.

~~~
marcosdumay
Human environments are mostly designed for wheels.

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paulftw
Sergey got bored with his new robot toy and chucked it into the same bin as
google glass, wave, internet balloon and some other stuff that got cancelled
before public announcement.

