Boston Dynamics
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2021–2025
1:06 · 17M views · Aug 17, 2021
Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.
HN uses it as the benchmark for state-of-the-art humanoid robot mobility in discussions of Tesla Bot and robotics progress.
14 comments from Hacker News
I can say I'm much impressed. At the same time I haven't watched Boston Dynamics videos for last couple of years. When I checked latest Atlas demo from 2021 it look like sci-fi to me: this video
We said the same thing about movement in robots -- and today we have: this video Just ridiculous how far things have come, it seems fake it's so far along.
That Tim Urban piece is great. It's also an interesting time capsule in terms of which AI problems were and were not considered hard in 2015 (when the post was written). From the post: > Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second—incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat—spectacularly difficult. Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done. Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old’s picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them? Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it. Hard things—like calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation—are mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things—like vision, motion, movement, and perception—are insanely hard for it. The children's picture book problem is solved; those billions of dollars were well-spent after all. (See, e.g., DeepMind's recent Flamingo model [1].) We can do whatever we want in vision, more or less [2]. Motion and movement might be the least developed area, but it's still made major progress; we have robotic parkour [3] and physical Rubik's cube solvers [4], and we can tell a robot to follow simple domestic instructions [5]. And Perceiver (again from DeepMind [6]) took a big chunk out of the perception problem. Getting a computer to carry on a conversation [7], let alone draw art on par with human professionals [8], weren't even mentioned as examples
I agree with the neighbor comment, 2015 was a long time ago. See the state of the art today: Agility Robotics Digit: [LINK] Boston Dynamics Atlas: this video Neither of those robots use a static walk. That is obvious enough in the above Boston Dynamics video, but Agility Robotics also just released a little video explaining their (very robust) dynamic walking system: [LINK] It seems clear the basic hardware to do humanoid walking is technologically achievable today. Personally I would think Tesla would be better suited by copying or buying Agility Robotics as Digit is a smaller robot and it looks cheaper than Atlas too. Better for working in a warehouse alongside people as shown in the top video link in this post, and they seem a smaller company than BD and so cheaper to buy. Musk is very happy to buy firms that produce tech his companies need. As far as the software problem, it is a big one to be sure. I don't think they have all the pieces to the puzzle, but I do think Tesla's Dojo AI system has promise for training a machine like a humanoid. Their system is designed to ingest experience and produce neural nets which can navigate in the real world. They may be willing to take a bet, despite the clear risks, on using this system for humanoids. If they buy Agility Robotics, rev the design to add their AI system (which is extremely powerful AI hardware with their own custom processor), they could be in production on prototypes within a year. This all has the disclaimer that succe
Reusable rockets weren't practical either. But someone was maverick enough to attempt it anyways. [1] You provide valuable information but I just hate how you succumb to easy thinking, an appeal to tradition [2]: "well it hadn't been done then so it can't possibly be done now." It's a form of anachronistic gatekeeping. It doesn't belong in the age we currently reside in. We have totally different computational abilities today, powerful beyond reason. Our hardware is smaller and better performing. We can perform digital simulations billions of times before we even execute one physical experiment. I've seen the same attitude with age-old mathematics problems and it makes even less sense in that domain. The ability to perform computational experiments that our predecessors couldn't, changes the viability of almost every unsolved problem. Boston Dynamics would have never created Atlas or Spot if they clung to common tropes about robots. And now, due to battery technology, the once tethered robots are dexterously mobile. [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video