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Boston Dynamics has released a pair of new videos showcasing its Atlas bipedal robot. The first is the typical Boston Dynamics flash, with two Atlas units demonstrating an extremely impressive gymnastics routine. They flip, they jump, they almost fall finished but not quite – it’s great. The second video, however, offers an unusually transparent assessment of Atlas’s capabilities, as company engineers explain what goes into creating these routines.
As Boston Dynamics has said before, Atlas is essentially a research project: a cutting edge machine that helps company engineers build better control and perception systems. “On a practical level, it’s a platform on which we can do R&D,” says Benjamin Stephens, control manager for Atlas, in the video. This research includes those gymnastics and parkour routines, with which the company regularly delights (and annoys) the Internet.
Some roboticists, however, have criticized Boston Dynamics for misleading people about the capabilities of its machines. His videos are impressive, yes, but they’re also tightly structured demos – orchestrated routines that require a lot of tinkering and tweaking. You can’t just point Atlas at a course and let him do his job, as Stephens explains in the behind-the-scenes video: video or a parkour video.
It’s great to have that clarity, and in an accompanying blog post, the engineers at the company give more details on how the robot has changed over the years. They note that in past demonstrations he was essentially blind – it was just a matter of making moves that would be successful as long as his surroundings remained unchanged. But now it relies more on its own perception to navigate, which means it’s less pre-programmed than before.
“In this iteration of parkour, the robot adapts the behaviors of its repertoire based on what it sees,” the blog explains. “This means that engineers don’t need to pre-program the jumping movements for all the possible platforms and spaces the robot might encounter. “
And compared to past gymnastic routines, today’s video is remarkable, with the robot’s movements seeming even a little Human on time. Just watch that moment about 37 seconds where Atlas jumps onto a platform, wobbles for a second, and then regains his balance. This is the kind of dynamic response that you can not preprogram and so much the better.
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