Do You Love Me? [video]
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In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing.
It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately. Many of my relatives and friends in my home country haven't even heard about any of these. They're not mentioned in the news or magazines whatsoever. Granted, they probably don't have any use for this information for their daily lives... but I do believe learning about this keeps alive my sense of childlike wonder, and it's sad to know others are missing out.
1. Neither I, nor my friends will ever be able to afford X
2. X is going to make my life worse
Usually I feel both.
"X is never quite what it seems"
I think the risk that the wealthiest few will rule the world is largely misplaced and overblown. We’ve lifted millions out of poverty and made tremendous progress in last few decades. And continue to do so. Yes, inequality has grown and accelerated due to the pandemic (Russell 2000 vs S&P500, retail is screwed but there is nothing we can do about it besides giving relief). We need to fix tax laws and corporate loop holes, not instituting marxism in our society.
"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Boston Dynamics takes over paths and shows robots dancing with each other is their robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. Unstructured, "soft" interaction seem pretty easy to us but might actually close to "AI complete" in their potential complexity.
In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing.
I think your list illustrates how there's a wide variation among technologies in the time from demonstration to implementation. I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s. Hobby drones are just now becoming useful, forty years later. Jet packs have been around for a long time but you still can't use them without serious safety precautions and they still aren't a way people would commute.
This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it.
Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI
Doing it without a tether for a reasonable timeframe (30+ minutes) is insane! Disney animatronics don't even come close to the complexity of these robots (even though what Disney has done is for sure impressive).
> robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way.
I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. This style of robot has definitely hit a threshold of price and usefulness, not unlike what happened for drones just ten years ago.
I could be wrong, but I hope I'm not! It really feels like things are moving at a crazy speed in the robotics field right now.
I think it's more like the Feynman example of how a scientist may look at a flower.
A person may see a full-size puppet when they see a choreographed robot, but all I can think about is how complicated the mechanisms -- software and hardware -- must be in order to dynamically balance a robot while maintaining whatever timing is called out for the choreography work; and the person-hours that such work must have consumed.
Granted, the first time I took him to a rocky riverside all four paws fell into cracks between the boulders like some early Boston Dynamics prototype (he's from Texas and I guess never encountered terrain like that before) but he's a pro now. And he's mastered "soft human interaction" right out of the box (is just amazing with toddlers).
Seeing all this firsthand makes me appreciate how fine-tuned the product of evolution is and how much work must go into achieving basic behaviors we take for granted.
Tesla did this in 1898.
https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-con...
Dancing just isn't impressive and like you say, seems a lot like a higher tech version of Disneyworld. What I want to see is one of these, on its own accord, run into a burning building and save a child. Choreography just isn't impressive outside of the 'wow' factor. Without advanced AI brains, these bodies are almost useless shells and I imagine Google getting out of this space may have had something to do with that.
With all due respect to Disney's Imagineers and their technical accomplishments, you can't really compare Disney animatronics that are literally bolted to the floor to what's being demonstrated here.
You can compare the animatronic presidents etc. to various industrial robots that are also fixed in place if you like, but the closest Disney equivalent to Atlas etc. are the 'stuntronics' first demonstrated in 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/disney-imagineering-has-cr...
Robot uprising won't be an issue until the robots learn to operate and maintain the entire supply chain that goes into making them.
It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously scary technical advancements going on lately.
It sounds like science fiction. It's hard to emphasize enough how far the current state of AI is from what you're describing. I would be surprised if in 10 years we have a remote idea of how to build what you're describing, let alone have it actually exist and run.
I was going to comment on your willingness to speak for most people in the US, but tbh - I'm still laughing at the idea of YouTube annihilating people (in self defense, of course). I can just see general M. Mouse commanding the forces with all the strategy and tactics he learned at the Walt Disney Military College. I believe '303:annihilate all the humans' was right in-between '101: manipulating copyright law for fun and profit' and '404: the nuclear option - Copyright for mass destruction'
Rather than self-defense, I'd expect the first examples of autonomous robot-on-human violence to be at the behest of an overenthusiastic spam filter.
It is (sometimes) different if the comments are from a fan base on an established channel, but that is clearly not the case here.
At very least, you should be aware that is strongly overselects for knee-jerk reactions and people that are in a bad mood.
Let me clarify for the empathy disabled people: The problem is that "technological advancements" have little to no public oversight and MAGA(Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon) publicly are working with Military Industrial Complex. They all have political and financial power equivalent of small countries, private security armies, lobbyists on demand and PR masterminds.
I get it, lots of you are employed by them and they provide for you a standard of living. But we as people are entering an era in which willing to act beforehand will define the future of your kids (If you will have them at all).
Long before AGI is present, the power of technology will be abused in "legal" or "illegal" ways.
Let’s talk about why it looks fake.
I think it comes from the use of hydraulics. Biological muscle is way less linear (it works more like a second-order control system, where things often overshoot their target before dampening).
But one part of it may also be algorithmic: the robot’s Kalman filter (?) may correct for errors from sensor fusion much faster than a human would.
I would love a more informed opinion than mine though.
On a dancing person you see all the slight adjustments to keep balance that make it feel natural, I believe these robots do it too fast for us to notice and so it seems like CGI where keeping balance isn't a thing.
This is how the robot moves IN REALITY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhND7Mvp3f4
Almost as though they had to edit out some balance-assisting device.
Also: why are the people at the right speed, but it feels like the robots are sped up? Them being sped up would be fine, but if the two are at different speeds then it’s a clear indicator that it’s composited.
Adam Savage: https://youtu.be/-R8wUybrspo?t=2374
Marques Brownlee: https://youtu.be/s6_azdBnAlU?t=249
I wondered if they covered the bots in a flowing dress if it would sell the illusion even more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE
More than the smoothness, there just seems to be something off about the weight and momentum that you tend to see in high-end, big-budget-movie CGI, but it's hard to put a definite finger on it.
I think this is a similar effect but in reverse -- we know the limbs are heavy and aren't made of styrofoam, so the fact that they are moving like they are is uncanny. Our brains aren't used to motorized and hydraulic limbs.
You can get a little bit of this effect watching assembly line arms sometimes, but it's less jarring because they are clearly disembodied, whereas this thing is fairly humanoid.
As someone who works in the VFX industry, faking reflections on wobbling/flexing glass screens (static ones are easy) is actually pretty difficult to do right, and I doubt they would have added the camera operators if they were faking it.
Some of the aspects making people think this is CG are the diffuse lighting (no obvious hard shadows or occlusion), very clean robots, "weird" (i.e. not normal, but I believe it's honest for the robots) motion, and lack of sound.
It's kinda funny because most robot demo videos are sped up and/or CGI, but this one isn't.
Everyone's so afraid of Terminators hunting them down, when in reality, mostly invisible , and mostly silent, Predator drones from a mile away that will kill you with precisely targeted missiles should be your real fear. Or commercial quad-copters carrying anti-personnel mines.
The expense, complexity, power, etc to build bipedal assassins is higher than wheeled RC vehicles, quad copters, and missiles.
The weapons that exist today are much more scary than these robots.
Similarly, Terminator 2 showed large tracked vehicles.
Slaughterbots https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA
I mean, I guess better a robot than a person.. but still.. pretty terrifying to think we are soon to have people hunting robots.
James Crowley had recently left, so sadly I never got to meet him. I think I would have liked him and vice versa, having probably similar interests in personally-assistive household companion robots -- like Silent Running drones. When I was between two housing rentals that did not quite overlap, I slept one night on the floor of his mostly-emptied Household Robots lab next to a running PERQ computer to keep warm (from the cold air conditioning). The crazy things you do when you are twenty... :-)
It was kind of sad for me (for a couple of reasons) to see Raibert's dynamic robots immobile in the MIT museum when I visited there with my kid a few years ago. But I can be glad those robots got a good home there and the recognition they deserved -- rather than, say, be discarded for scrap like the 1942 Atanasoff-Berry computer at Iowa State (since thankfully reconstructed).
CMU's Robotics Institute was heavily supported by defense dollars back then -- even as at least some (or maybe even all?) robotics researchers there then thought giving robots guns was a dumb idea. There were also researchers -- especially in Hans' lab -- who thought robots would and even should surpass humanity as "Mind Children". But I wondered if even that positive aspiration would really work out as well as some hoped. Since then, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the future of robotics and humanity, and how to get more benefits than harms from robotics. It probably would not take much more than a dumb-ish self-replicating anti-personnel robotic cockroaches to wipe out humanity. (Or even smaller self-replicating things like infectious bioweapons...) And even the smartest AIs like in James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" novel might wipe out humanity first in their infancy and then perhaps only later regret it. And if robots and AIs are designed mainly by competitive people to give themselves (or their funders) competitive advantages over other people -- whether for military or business reasons -- bad outcomes seem more likely than if other motives guide their creation.
Even as there is no certainty even given the best intentions, as I saw from a simulation I made a couple years later on a Symbolics in ZetaLisp of self-replicating robotics -- who unintendedly turned cannibalistic during the first simulation run (eating their own children). I had only programmed them to simply assemble themselves to an ideal form from nearby parts and then divide. But after they divided, the most convenient source of spare parts was their offspring. I ultimately had to add a sense of "smell" and scent marking of self/child to avoid that. That unexpected total surprise of the (simulated) robots initial behavior -- obvious now in hindsight -- has stuck in my mind every since.
Although, even as I called the fix "smell", perhaps one might think of it as "love"? :-) Related: "Straight Up -- by Paula Abdul" https://genius.com/Paula-abdul-straight-up-lyrics "I've been a fool before / Wouldn't like to get my love caught in the slammin' door / How about some information, please? / ... Do, do you love me? ..."
In any case, it seems plausible that our direction heading out of any Singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction/maturity going into one. Acting positively and pro-actively may be the best hope we have -- and that means we need to emphasize social wisdom ASAP (whether a UBI or whatever other compassionate initiatives). The result of decades of thinking since then is summarized in my email sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Or in more detail, essentially we need to move away from a model of unilateral domineering security to one of mutual intrinsic security, as I explain here: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transce... "... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
This hit a nerve. I was at a CMU event with my daughter a few years back - when she was a member of Girls of Steel. My daughter came and told me excitedly that "my robot was here" and brought me over to where the Terregator was on display. I told the roboticist who was there how exciting it was to see it after thirty years, and that it was wonderful to see that it still worked. He said, "Sorry. Actually it's likely not operating two decade. It was placed here with a fork lift."
Is it reliability? Did this video a zillion takes?
Is it manufacturing? Maybe it's hard to scale them up?
Is it battery life? Maybe it can power itself for just a few minutes?
Is it object manipulation or sensing/world understanding? Maybe it can't apply the right forces to a soft thing or a flexible thing or know what it can step on vs over or what will move or stay still?
Is it just that anything worth automating is worth specializing, and there are better robots for different specific tasks?
We've seen industrial robots for a while now, and these more general robots have gotten really good, so where are they?
In actual factories, which are highly controlled environments, the things called robots are much simpler and more specialized. So you're "Is it just that anything worth automating is worth specializing, and there are better robots for different specific tasks?" point is more or less it.
But also consider, while these bipedal, quadrupedal and wheeled robots can do all sorts of these in isolation, their ability to accomplish things autonomously in the chaotic, unstructured world outside the factory is little-to-none, accent on none. The Darpa Robitics challenge was essentially considered a failure, all entrant failed. Most could not do the "walk to a door and open it" challenge.
Similarly, Boston Dynamics sells their "big dog" walking robot to the military but it is seldom if ever deployed. It's strong and faster than a horse with basically the use case as a pack horse. But well trained pack horse won't injure if you get in front of it and will walk along with the troops on it's own without a guy with joy stick directing it. And the Big Dog needs constant direction.
Basically, robots don't have even the "animal intelligence" needed for real world activity.
And the Big Dog requires a lot of technical experts surrounding it at all times, an energy production system, and if it falls over or gets stuck it will be harder for one or two people to get it back to orientation.
In an industrial setting, a purpose-built robot will outdo these robots, or a human, at nearly all tasks. And whatever these things are doing, likely a human can do it better with a little bit of training- that's low capital cost compared to these robots.
Carrying things around? Conveyor belts. Picking things up? Robot arms. Going up and down stairs? Elevators and/or conveyor belts. If your aim is to make money, a general purpose robot is rarely the best choice.
The only real purpose I can see for these things is being able to travel quickly in rough terrain. Military applications, basically. Just picture a small army of these robots, armed with tasers, chasing you through the woods. While dancing.
This reminds me of the (alleged) Tom Watson quote: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
These robots will be everywhere in twenty years. The cost and the software aren't there yet, but it's only a matter of time. Flexibility and time to market will beat purpose-built robots in many cases once the cost comes down. Many purpose-built factories will disappear. Local, distributed generalist factories will spring up, staffed by robots. Drones and autonomous vehicles will deliver "hand-crafted" products directly to customers.
With autonomous vehicles poised to replace the most common job in the majority of U.S. states -- truck driver -- we're on the verge of massive systemic changes. That's at best. At worst, with economic and political tensions already high, we'll get violence and bloodshed on a global scale.
Did you notice the robot's hands? Or, you know, lack thereof?
These robots are impressive, amazing and advanced ... but they are demonstrating mobility, not utility.
If you want your robot to really replace people, it needs amazing hands. Also amazing visual processing, but there's a lot of work being done there by the autonomous vehicle people, and I'm not sure who is currently leading the pack on hands.
There is none.
These robots are currently in use screening COVID patients, assessing parts of the Chernobyl plant and working in warehouses. Those are just the applications that I know of.
I think the "barrier to industrial use" was simply that Boston Dynamics wanted to ensure they had a fairly mature platform before scaling up to significant production.
Battery technology.
Definitely quite a lot - take a look at the floor underneath some of them, shiny patches worn out by constant beatings I guess.
Check out MIT’s Underactuated Robotics class taught by Tedrake. Spring 2018 is all on Youtube, I believe. A Raibert Hopper simulation is one of the first homework sets. Post a link to tbe video of your solution.
- No studio setup, just their lab
- No artificial lighting
- No fucks given about hiding the mess
- Robots going through surgery in the background
- Song is classy af IMO
- Can see the camera man
- Can see the engineers/employees
- Framing/cinematography isn't as polished (this is a feature, not a bug)
- Chipped paint, beaten up fairings
- Logo is on point. It's Da Vinci level stuff. Humanist
It is totally opposite of what they build, such an amazing contrast and deeply thought out [1]
- One or two videos per year
- No twitter drama like a lot of SV companies (Hey, Elon)
- No excessive trying to get their word out. Their products speak for themselves
- No purple/gradient bullshit and design trends
- Their job descriptions actually make sense of what they need from you
- Their CEO, Marc Raibert, exudes wisdom, calm and has a persona of composure (seriously, watch his interviews) [2]
- No AI hype
I can't get over how amazing this video is. I hope it takes over the top spot on Youtube. It's got everything - music/tech/memes. The people behind BD marketing are geniuses IMO, although building an explosively-cool tech that appeals to all humans helps a lot. Outstanding.
This is recruitment marketing. The goal isn't to sell the robots, it to sell the experience of working on the robots so that they have basically every need on earth lusting to work there.
Even though I'm pretty sure engineers have been driven to tears trying to get a robot to do the mashed potato. Worth it.
Nerd lust: confirmed.
Their website has a tab called "Shop". I clicked, thinking one could buy t-shirts, perhaps a Spot plushie, but for $75K and change you can get your own robot dog. The "Buy Now" button is kinda crazy, like some user just happened on the site and Add-to-cart and in a week one could have this delivered in a box. It's only a smidge more than the Mac Pro.
To me, a real spartan approach to marketing is spending very little money on marketing, and just focusing on your product. That seems like the opposite of what Boston Dynamic is doing, because they put so much work specifically into creating these PR/marketing videos. Many of their robot models don't seem to exist for actual products, they just exist for marketing.
Wow :) I was under impression that, while Atlas is a flagship model with broad purposes, the other two are rather optimized transporting (and some other miscellaneous functions) robots, for specific applications.
Why do you think they couldn't find use as products?
However when I watched this video my first thought was “my god they’re going to bring the drone wars to the ground.” I am a robotics engineer and have been focused on robotics my whole life. I worked at Google X on a robotics team with some great ex-Boston Dynamics people, and some of my friends have since gone to work for them.
So I do understand what they have achieved. It’s fantastic from a technological perspective. And I know they have non military funders now. There’s a great many labor applications for machines like this if they can sell them for under half a million dollars and get them to do real work. I understand all that.
But I fear that if the US military orders some, the company would happily oblige. Maybe they’ve committed to only peaceful non military use. But these extremely agile and capable machines to me seem like some military strategists dream come true. So when I watch all of this achievement from a company that for so long survived off of military funding, I am deeply saddened by the implications.
Delivery robots and warehouse workers would be great. But these seem like in ten or 20 years time they’ll be another extension of the US global killing machine. I dream of a world where we can use robotics to make the world better, and the potential military use here leaves me uneasy. I cannot celebrate what I fear will be the dawn of ever more inhuman military conflict.
Technological progress will gaurantee this scenario of military use. If not BD, it will be another company. If not now, it will. If not the US, it will be someone else - China, Russia, etc.
I don't see anypoint in feeling sad about just some geeks making robots as much as we didn't become sad when we saw the transistor being invented. The future is in our hands and tech has always been at the center of military warfare. Focus should be on government policy, electing good leaders and engaging in diplomacy over warfare.
What happens in 20+ years when surplus ones are handed out like MRAPs to careless police departments?
It won't because for non-techies it's just a random video without any significance. I tried showing it to my girlfriend twice and she was extremely unimpressed and uninterested.
What a bizarre thing to say. Surely "non-techies" are able to extract some value from the video.
> I tried showing it to my girlfriend twice and she was extremely unimpressed and uninterested.
Oh, well, if your girlfriend was unimpressed and uninterested, we'll just extrapolate from that and presume the same for everyone else (at least everyone else's girlfriend).
Well, looks like it did.
I bet you believe all the vehicles racing around in automobile TV ads are real too.
When you’re competing in a vicious field for consumer mindshare it leads to the marketing and self aggrandizing because you’re literally trying to capture the attention of stupid people.
Edit: MIT branding is pretty cool too: https://web.mit.edu/ and always have been, although this is B2C.
Or do you believe the cars in car ads are real too?
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/cinematographer-reveals-one-...
Even so, yes, these robots are truly engineering marvels and I wholeheartedly applaud the team for their hard work!
I just think that squinting the eyes slightly past the "search and rescue", the war applications of this kind of technology are obvious: the Atlas could do perimeter guard duty even in a muddy, slightly sloped or otherwise difficult terrain, but it could also form hunt and kill squads who need no rest, whereas the hunted person or persons presumably would.
As for automation, it will certainly happen too: the Atlas is humanoid-shaped and once it matures to be more independent and capable with environmental manipulation, it could easily function as plug-and-play automation for many tasks currently requiring a human. Pick berries or fruits, do gardening, deliver things like mail/pizza, and so on.
Bottom line. Machines. Not Intelligent.
And then....
;-)
And it must also be said that these are preprogrammed maneuvers on a closed course...
The robot equivalent of performance anxiety.
How much did slack go for? 30 billion? For a shiny chat client with fewer features than the 25 year old tech they ape.
Yeah, until there's a B1-66ER incident...
https://www.army-technology.com/features/us-army-exoskeleton...
IMO they pay for the customer base more than the app itself.
There's a whole ton of unsolved problems:
- no true autonomy in chaotic/dynamic environments
- powering these machines for longer timespans is currently impossible (batteries endurance is measured in minutes, not hours)
- high skill level required for operating these machines (again - they're not autonomous in the slightest)
- paradox of complexity: it's easier to genetically engineer tomatoes that can withstand falling to the ground and being swept into a box than it is to engineer a machine that can identify and carefully pick ripe tomatoes as fast, as reliably and as cheap as a human worker
- motion planning and navigating unmapped environments is largely unsolved
- specialised machines are cheaper, more reliable and readily available: it's often more beneficial to modify the process than to program a generalised machine to perform human tasks, e.g. washing machines and dish washers don't need actual hands and tumble dryers don't need to use clothes lines yet all three work fine/better than the human version of the process
- AI safety is still in its infancy (even in the context of "just" motion planning and navigation); there's no such thing as tried and tested safety protocols for fully autonomous robots
- the state of the software (in terms of autonomy) is way behind the state of the hardware
- even Spot is for the most part still just a super low-volume solution looking for a problem
Judging from the comments in this thread, the value proposition for BD is still very unclear. Bi/quadriped robots are - currently, at least - an expensive solution to a problem that no-one really has.
Investing in BD is a gamble that they'll be able to carve out a profitable niche some time in the future. The valuation has to reflect that uncertainty.
While I can't argue they are actually worth much more, I think I do feel a bit of an 'I wish cool hardware got as much hype and attention as software' lament in general.
Second reaction: When's the OK Go video released?
Third reaction: They paid Boston Dynamics engineers to do this?
You don’t need an AI that ponders the meaning of life for you.
You just need a smart Decision and Control System (DCS).
Paired with additional technology for facial and gait recognition, obstacle avoidance, path planning, and you have all the hallmarks of a rudimentary hunter-killer bot.
What Boston Dynamics cracked here, is the physical control mechanism to allow these robots to live in our world.
Next, they need to build the brains, to allow this machine to move independently and autonomously.
But they don't have a product. What's the problem? My guesses:
* No one really needs this shit
* They have a control/feedback problem in interaction with moving objects i.e. this thing can't high-five you without breaking your hand or open a can
We usually handwave this shit with "But The Military" but like what's the use-case for the military? This fucker doesn't know how to react to anything so it's a bipedal trolley. But it's too expensive a trolley. If you take this guy with you, your mission is going to end up being to protect this guy. Take an extra human and he's way cheaper, way more versatile, and all that.
Not trying to be the usual HN negative because I actually think this is like the Newton or something. The tech is freaking cool, and it excites me as a glimpse to the future, but the product part is going to come some time in the future and it's going to be awesome and in hindsight we'll be like "Damn! That was the missing part. It's so obvious". Right now, though? I just hope someone will keep buying them and selling them like a hot potato so they live.
If it was dirt cheap I would buy one, attach a vacuum to it and have it clean my place. But they are super expensive, so fat chance of that.
Spot, the yellow dog, seems to be targeted at the notion of human safety. Think something like a building demo job gone wrong, send in the robot to pull out the dynamite.
In Norway they are being tested on oil platforms. If this robot can be used to fix one single problem on a platform that would otherwise have required a production shutdown...it’ll pay for itself several (hundred?) times over. This is especially the case for older platforms where you need to be more hands on and less can be done remotely.
We had a mountain side in Norway that was near collapsing and all the residents below it were evacuated every two weeks. The geologists wanted to use dynamite to dislodge it, but it was too dangerous for humans. In the future we might send a versatile robot like Spot up in a drone and have him plant the explosives. If he blows up in the process that would obviously suck, but still fairly cheap for what he would have accomplished.
Why not just drop a bomb from an airplane? That's already pretty well established technology. I'm pretty sure I've read about various places throwing hand grenades or dynamite from helicopters by hand to do that. Or let the nearest friendly air force drop a few of their lightest bombs on it for practice.
And it's fine, really. They push robotics forward, they solve really tough problems. It's infinitely more interesting and useful long-term than most of the high-valuation startups on the market these days. I'd take another BD for a different field over another DoorDash or WeWork any day.
The yellow robot, Spot, is available for purchase.
Not sure if its just so unreal, or maybe there's something unnatural in the movement or if some scenes were sped up.
The robots developed by ABB, KUKA, Mitsubishi and similars are very different to what Boston Dynamics is trying to build.
These are impressive robots but their utilitarian value is too low. An industrial robot by ABB with a clear use case in a manufacturing process costs like $80k. An impressive toy robot with no clear use case like Boston Dynamics’ Spot also costs $80k.
If these robots had a clear use case besides carrying heavy stuff, BD valuation would be 5X or 10X their current valuation.
Of course the real value would be to use their research and know-how on these type of high-mobility/low foot-footprint robotics into actual industrial settings and use cases.
Google didn’t have any internal use case for this tech and commercializing the technology as a vendor is way out of their competence and probably not enough value there to justify extra investment in sales, supply chain, etc.
SoftBank was just doing what it has been doing for the last decade which is investing in shiny things.
Hyundai may be the first owner to actually have a clear use case for this tech.
The dogs might be more usable, but even then modern conflicts are not really based on ground war. I don't think those have any significant value over a an actual drone.
Now a fleet of tiny quad-motor drones with a few bullets? That could work in high-density urban environment an quickly render guerilla warfare impossible. This project comes to mind: https://www.darpa.mil/program/offensive-swarm-enabled-tactic...
There are lots of interesting domestic uses for this kind of capability. In California it would be interesting to see if they could be used to fight fires. Even if the kinematics where programmed and they were launched with a 'follow' drone, I could imagine a 3rd Person game type UI for fire fighters who could take over control and "drive them" like they would a video game. That would enable a much larger fire fighting crew to be deployed.
[1] FWIW 'training mode' for workstation robots has been a thing for ever where an operator manually moves the robot through the steps it needs to do, then tweaks the program after running it. Fixed problems like "pick up a part in any orientation, then put it into this orientation" are part of the robots built in moves.
If I had to take a guess, I'd say that they were given a timeline of locations of extremities and chest/trunk and the magic sauce took care of how to distribute the weight to make it work, like a footprint chart
Disney have a paper on this for their robotics: https://youtu.be/Z1jgaEO9aRs
Though of course Disney have very different constraints, however it does illustrate that you can map from mocap to robotics motions by running solves and reversing out the artifacts.
Those can be encoded into timed poses and combine that with their real time compensation to achieve this motion
If I already feel a twinge of empathy for some soulless robots, where are we going to be a few years down the road when this phenomenon is more actively exploited?
Of course there will always be cases where we want to send a robot into an environment designed for humans (ex. firefighting) so there is value in humanoid robots, but it's interesting to me that we are going in two completely opposite directions with robotics. Imo humanoid robots will have some limited uses, but ultimately not be as useful as robots built for specific tasks.
Atlas is their only active humanoid platform, which they've stated is mainly a research platform just for the sake of advancing robotics and pushing the limits.
I don't see a future for humanoid bots in war. Missiles and drones seems to render anything else redundant. Policing in a few more generations seems possible, at least at a technical level.
The balancing of the first bipedal robot doesn't seem right to my human eyes, but I think it's conceivable that computers controling a robot could manage it. Also, the dual bipedal robots aren't perfectly in-sync which is either very good cgi, or it's real.
There's no way Boston Dynamics would publish a hyper-realistic fake (setting aside how much effort that would be). It would be very damaging to their brand.
The way this breaks has everything to do with the lessons people have drawn from past mistakes with technology. It's an unsettling thought.
He doesn’t say exactly how they have done things on the low-level, but there is enough to go out digging into what he and other people have published.
Have they escaped and gone rogue, or are they just sat on the naughty step?
I suppose it isn't a bad way to go.
No.
PS: One of the robots seems leaking hydraulic fluid.
"No, I don't …"
"You have 20 seconds to comply."
Then the second robot came into the picture. I went LOL.
Then Spot came into the picture, and my heart skipped a beat.
Then the velociraptor on wheels came into the picture, and I just lost it. I think my brain just melted down.
Next stop: Guns. Lots of guns.
Time to be afraid. Very afraid.
I shudder to think what war variant machines will resort to when they are running low on ammo.
Do robots need to follow the Geneva convention?
Right now there's civil liability for the end customer, integrator, and manufacturer (depending on who failed to follow ANSI/ISO robotic safety guidelines) in industrial automation accidents, and criminal liability if the failure rises to the level of negligence. It honestly works pretty well, every site I've ever worked at has been happy to put safety first and throughput second, to a degree that my ordinarily cynical outlook is pleasantly surprised.
But I don't trust the justice system to correctly follow logical reasoning when these things are used for violence. Who's at fault when a desperate soldier straps something to one of these things and sends it off to commit war crimes - the soldier? The brass who put the soldier in that position with those tools and got that entirely expected result? Boston Dynamics engineers and others who built the tools and shipped them with fine print that says "by clicking OK you agree not to violate the Geneva convention with this"? The robot itself, sentenced to run with worn out bearings and low hydraulic fluid in a long prison sentence?
It brings to mind the Nathaniel Borenstein quote [1]:
> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
They do not have a DNA, they do not have a face or an accent, they can technically come from anywhere in the world and be owned by anyone or noone.
Will we be ruled by tyrants backed by robotic armed forces? will people be harassed by throwaway robotic private investigators or hitmen? I can see many ways in which this can end up poorly.
There are many potential constructive uses for robots too, of course... but people in power love control, and I would expect robots to be used to implement control related stuff first, before they get put to work to the service of society. Just like everything else...