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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

The success of old Atlas was partly due to the compactness and high power of hydraulic actuators. There’s a lot of actuators to pack into a humanoid robot and it takes a lot of power to do backflips.

I am betting that this one is less powerful, no backflip.

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Their press release actually says electric atlas is more powerful. Though I wonder if that's higher peak torque, and not so much explosive power required for jumps. A commercial robot doesn't need to do parkour.

In that case the question is why did they use hydraulics in the first place.

Static holds. Once you pressurize the cylinder to make it move to a certain position, it can hold that position without using more energy.

This makes sense for quasi-static systems but obviously is a limiting factor for dynamic robots.

Here is a quote from Ben Katz [1], who wrote a dissertation on building the mini-Cheetah at MIT, before joining Boston Dynamics:

"The hydraulic legged robots from Boston Dynamics, starting with Big Dog, have set the standard for the performance capabilities of modern legged robots. Hydraulic actuators tend to have high force density and high robustness to impacts, as impact loads are distributed over the large surface area of the hydraulic channels, rather than, for example several small gear teeth. Another compelling reason to use hydraulics, especially for high degree-of-freedom machines, is the relative ease of adding high-force degrees of freedom. For an electric motor driven robots, each actuator needs to be sized for its peak performance, which makes building systems with many degrees of freedom needing high peak power and force at all the joints (and especially at distal joints) very challenging. With a hydraulic system, it is easier to build high-force distal links (ankles, wrists, fingers, etc) without adding significant mass and inertia to the limbs."

[1] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/118671/105734...

They did say it’s for commercial use. Probably for warehouses and such where sadly backflipping is not relevant

You'll know AGI has really arrived when we do have factory robots backflipping and doing stupid stuff to amuse themselves.

I feel Robot Unions will have to make backflipping as part of collective bargain agreement.

What do we want??

BACKFLIPS.

When do we want them?

[backflips]

And posting that to robot tiktok

see what i find puzzling is that warehouses have flat floors right? so what benefit does the upfront cost of building something with a bunch of extra actuators for all the joints in 2 legs, and the ongoing running costs of far less mechanically efficient bipedal locomotion have over wheeled movement like their other robot, the Handle, offers? i should mention i know nothing about robots so i'm sure there must be a good reason for it, but this thought has been on my mind ever since I saw george hotz bring it up in the Comma Body reveal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhvt0ZmqmGQ as a layperson, i feel like biomimicry only makes sense for hands and arms, at least for the vast majority of commercial use cases

Stairs.

> warehouses have flat floors right

"Flat"... with a bunch of cracks, joints, pallet chips, and other debris

You are absolutely right. And this is reflected in the choice of robots deployed in warehouses.

For example, Amazon uses hundreds of thousands of simple wheeled floor-jack like robots to move the shelves around [1], and they started doing this many years ago.

Meanwhile, they have only a handful of humanoid robots, on experimental basis, trying to decide if they are useful [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULswQgd73Tc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8IdbodRG14

In this interview, Robert Playter actually says, that the new electronic Atlas is stronger than the old hydraulic one:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/atlas-humanoid-robot-ceo-interview

I still can't search the word "hydroaccumunoid" on Google, that appeared once in one of their promo reels, and still am wondering if the word was literal corporate secret.

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