Seen on Time: Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, Atlas, explored the Massachusetts wilderness in a video shown at the Fab Lab conference earlier this month and posted online Saturday. Atlas specializes in walking like humans do and being able to navigate uneven surfaces or surprise obstacles by shifting its weight.
Read full article on Time.
Our take:
A video of Boston Dynamic’s ATLAS at a recent MIT conference shows the humanoid robot going for a walk in the woods near the company’s Massachusetts headquarters.
Built by the Google-owned Boston Dynamics, with funding and oversight from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the robot specializes in walking like humans and being able to navigate uneven surfaces and obstacles by shifting its weight. A recent programming update via a new algorithm from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition enables it to walk with more agility and control than ever before.
ATLAS is used as part of the DARPA’s Robotic Challenge, in which teams compete to develop and program robots to be used in disaster response scenarios. Teams entering Trial Track B/C receive a "shell" ATLAS robot that they’ve programmed in order to complete in the challenges.
In and of itself, ATLAS is an accomplishment, but Boston Dynamics isn’t done.
"We’re interested in getting this robot out into this world,” says Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert in the video, at MIT’s FAB 11 conference. "Out in the world is just a totally different challenge than the lab—you can’t predict what it’s going to be like. This isn’t completely 'out in the world' because there’s that power tether, but we’re working a version that doesn’t have that."
- James Carroll, Senior Web Editor
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