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If the previous Atlas videos have made you feel uncomfortable, it's unlikely that a new extract of the amplified humanoid robot can calm your nerves. This shows that the Boston Dynamics battery powered robot has gone beyond jogging and turning back and is now practicing parkour, the combat-based fitness regime developed by Special Forces soldiers.
In the 29-second video, released Thursday on the company's YouTube channel, Atlas jumps over a newspaper and zigzags gracefully to climb a series of vertical obstacles measuring about 16 inches tall.
The demonstration is not violent or threatening. But the people who saw it seem convinced that the remarkable agility of Atlas is alarming.
"Note that humans are no longer present in the video. The robots probably killed them all, "commented one speaker. "Please, stop doing Terminators," said another.
Why would an unarmed robot less than five feet tall make us fearful? The commentator's reference to "The Terminator", the sci-fi horror film of 1984, which caused a sensation, may be a clue.
"The dystopian narratives in science fiction and pop culture make us a bit afraid of an uprising of humanoid robots," Kate Darling, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., And an expert on human interactions. robot, told NBC News MACH in an email.
So, if we have seen a fictional robot send its human opponents with ruthless efficiency, it's perhaps easy to think bad of a real robot like Atlas.
Boston Dynamics has a different perspective. "This robot [purpose] This is really to stimulate innovation within our group, to make us understand how to marry controls on complex machines, "said Aaron Saunders, vice president of engineering for the company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, earlier this year. "It's also to create an impression of what robots can do."
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