olinerd
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2008–2019
3:29 · 17M views · Mar 17, 2008
Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.
HN returns to it as the classic jaw-dropping demo of legged robots handling rough terrain, and as a historical marker for how long such robots have existed.
8 comments from Hacker News
I thought Toyota was pretty good until I followed the link in the article to Big Dog. this video Big Dog is truly awesome. It runs, jumps, recovers from slips, climbs over rubble, ...
Here's some specific suggestions. I was most recently fascinated by this video on head tracking "virtual reality". [LINK] Another cool thing if you're into DIY robots (not really educational, but I found it inspiring) is the Yellow Drum Machine. [LINK] Not sure why I got on the robot tangent but here's another good one, a 4-legged robot that's pretty good at navigating hills and obstacles. Especially the recovery from a fall sequence around 1:25. this video And here is hacking the Wii Fit controller and a Roomba to do a sort of vacuum-by-surfing... thing? [LINK]
I find amazing how difficult it is to successfully perform apparently trivial tasks such as walking. There's more information about the 'LittleDog' on the Boston Dynamics website: [LINK] I was really impressed 2 years ago by their video of the 'BigDog': this video (check out t=40s)
Progress takes time, and ambulatory motion is a finicky, delicate nightmare that only seems simple in humans and animals thanks to millions of years of evolution. CAM was created in the 1960s[0], but BigDog[1] and other recent Boston Dynamics quadrupeds that aren't designed for human passengers are much faster[2], but still awkward. Also remember these are expensive prototypes designed to test things other than speed. Making them faster only guarantees that they break themselves harder when they run into a wall or trip over a cliff or something. [0] [LINK] [1] this video [2] [LINK] >I think Neal Stephenson described a skateboard with hundreds of tiny feet, moving faster than wheels on any surface. I want to see that. I am neither Neal Stephenson nor a physicist but I'm pretty sure the friction caused by the increased surface contact of "hundreds of tiny feet" versus wheels would still make the wheels faster and more efficient. Geckos and things can stick to vertical surfaces and move quickly because they're lightweight. Anything capable of sticking to an arbitrary surface and supporting human weight is going to be slow. And if moving downhill, wheels don't really need to do work - gravity does the work. Something with "hundreds of tiny feet" either has to slide or "walk."
[LINK] Insight, creativity, and general intelligence are all different and active areas of research. There is quite a lot of progress in creativity. Google for 'creative software'. Insight can mean many things, but Watson can now provide insights into cancer diagnosis. Consciousness is actually fairly well understood in terms of attention, focus, and other aspects. Artificial general intelligence is a very active field seeing quite a bit of progress. Here is a bird that flies with flapping wings: [LINK] (By the way, that is completely unrelated to AI). Walking over uneven terrain, (also completely unrelated to artificial general intelligence): [LINK] this video Deep learning is beyond statistical pattern matching. It does involve both supervised and unsupervised learning. Deep learning is currently the most successful technique, but not the most ambitious approach in AGI. Google for 'AGI', 'deep learning', 'sparse autoencoder', 'hierarchical hidden Markov model', 'OpenCog', 'spiking neural network', 'Hierarchical Temporal Memory'