
IHMC Teaches Atlas to Walk Like a Human - rbanffy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/ihmc-teaches-atlas-to-walk-like-a-human
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clairity
human-like gaits mainly require the correct structural elements (rather than
machine learning), like locking knees (as noted in the article) and slightly
elastic legs and joints (for energy storage/release as well shock absorbtion).

most robots are energetically inefficient and require extraneous computational
power because they don't take advantage of passive dynamics
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_dynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_dynamics)).
it's disappointing to realize that we still haven't caught up to fundamental
biological systems yet, even though the research is 2+ decades old.

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budadre75
Roboticists have built passive walking robots like the one from Cornell, it
walked 5.6 miles without power.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDljbN7eJ5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDljbN7eJ5Y)
Japanese roboticists have built passive walking robot with locking knees:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhu2xNIpgDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhu2xNIpgDE)

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tkoolen
Exactly. The thing that hasn't been figured out yet is how to combine the
energy efficiency and aesthetics of passive walking with the versatility
needed to have the robot do useful work, especially in a principled way.

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StavrosK
Whenever I see an Atlas video it surprises me how much I anthropomorphise it.
I should be thinking about it like a wheel or jet engine or something, as it's
just a means of locomotion, but I can't help by thinking about it like an
almost-sentient AI, even though it has nothing like intelligence.

If you showed me a chat bot and a walking robot, I would say that the walking
robot is orders of magnitudes closer to being human, even though it's just a
glorified Segway.

Very funny how that works.

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warent
This is similar to what I experienced. There seems to be a heuristic in the
brain that sees a human-like object and immediately starts trying to
superimpose other human-like qualities on it. It's almost like an optical
illusion where the brain totally misinterprets a visual cue, but in this case
it's perhaps more like a social/empathetic/mirroring illusion.

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ruytlm
I'd argue closely related to the Uncanny Valley:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

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Waterluvian
"Even Boston Dynamics’ own Atlas uses this crouching sort of squat-walk to get
around, because those perpetually bent legs are how it keeps from falling
over."

If I ever lock my joints I feel like I'm going to fall over too. I wonder if a
more human walk might just be less efficient for bipedal movement and balance.

Also, I'm betting that by March we will see Atlas do a Fortnite dance.

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maxerickson
For walking, I imagine you do lock your knee as you stride off of your toe.

That's a dynamic situation though, locking joints in a static situation pretty
much requires thinking about balance, so you'd notice perturbations more.

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ChuckMcM
Every time the grad student punches the robot with a stick I wonder when it is
going to punch back :-) It says something about the improvement in
anthropomorphism I think.

Real gaits though really need a foot with four degrees of freedom rather than
the more common three. Typically the 'foot' plate has a roll, pitch, and yaw
component. If you add an additional bend access where humans and animals have
the 'ball' of their foot so that you have a flat surface on the ground while
"up on your toes" to can add some additional gait styles.

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warent
Another reminder of how incredibly powerful our brains are. Walking and motor
skills seem like such basic things because we start mastering them as
toddlers. Meanwhile, teams of experts across the world are still trying to
figure out how to get a robot to do it. For example, they're talking about
finding out the location of where to toe-off based on some instantaneous
capture point. None of that ever consciously came to my mind, but these crazy
calculations are constantly running in the background.

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krapp
This is known as Moravec's Paradox[0]. Fine motor skills and basic visual
cognition require far more computational effort than high-level reasoning.

[0][https://medium.com/@froger_mcs/moravecs-
paradox-c79bf638103f](https://medium.com/@froger_mcs/moravecs-
paradox-c79bf638103f)

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dwaltrip
I think it is a bit generous to call an AI's behavior in those areas "high-
level reasoning" :)

It is certainly quite impressive. But it seems to me that the paradox is
neatly solved by comparing the how well-constrained the activity is.

Movement and (especially) visual processing are _incredibly_ general problems.
Where as board games are very narrow, well-constrained problems.

It always interesting when people expect AI to robustly and effectively
process visual content without first actually understanding the world (which
obviously no AI is even close to doing).

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perl4ever
"We’re trying now to design approaches that are capable of both precise
footstep placement, such as when walking over a rock field with few, sparse
footholds, and are robust to when this precision fails, such as really
compliant terrain with lots of subtle height variations, using a single
algorithm."

Somehow I have the feeling that robots capable of striding confidently over
mountains of human skulls could be coming sooner than some think...

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maxerickson
You don't think they'll have any uses for bone meal?

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krapp
At least in the future we won't have to suffer the indignity of being gunned
down by military robots doing a silly walk.

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stcredzero
However, if the government would like to ramp up the level of military robot
indignity, I guess we'll need some kind of ministry to track and catalog silly
walks.

