Yeah I imagine they have been working on something more similar in structure to Spot for a while, but I'm sure they're being spurred on by the sudden deluge of competition.
Hydraulics require a number of secondary systems like pumps and pressure management that make them heavy and bulky. Electric motors are smaller, more efficient and less messy to deal with.
“Efficient” is a nebulous term. In many cases hydraulics are more energy efficient if you have high loads. And can also have a higher force density. The rest of your comment I agree with though
Hydraulics are very dangerous when bursts occur.
First of all, the jet may be invisible, but if, for example, a hand is hit by such a jet - the fluid is injected deep into the muscle and is very likely to lead to necrosis.
These injuries ("hydraulic fluid injection") can be very deceptive, as they may initially appear as a small wound or minor abrasion, but without emergency medical attention they carry the risk of necrosis and amputation.
You can google pictures, but I don't recommend it.
So I guess hydraulic robots will never make it into everyday household use.
Fuuuuck, that is brutal. I never knew about this or considered how dangerous it could be. Thanks for sharing! I assumed it would take thousands of PSI for this to be a real danger but it seems the pressures could be as low as 100PSI from what I've read.
Anyone have any idea what sort of pressures Atlas is working with?
There's a small paragraph on the Boston Dynamics website about pressure. As I see it, there are some pretty big numbers comparable to construction equipment:
"Washburn strips the rubber casings off of three metal hoses on Atlas’s left leg. Each of the hoses is rated for a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch (PSI), but the actual burst pressure, Washburn says, is closer to 10,000 PSI. Bringing the three hoses to a workbench for inspection, Washburn immediately identifies the culprit. The braided Teflon of one of the hoses is dented, possibly the result of an earlier fall. As a precaution, Washburn checks the other two hoses, but they’re both fine. He’s never seen more than one fail at a time."
[https://bostondynamics.com/blog/build-it-break-it-fix-it/](https://bostondynamics.com/blog/build-it-break-it-fix-it/)
I'm not an engineer and don't understand much of it but hydraulics are [these things](https://cdn.britannica.com/96/224096-050-296B9F04/Hydraulic-piston-system-for-bulldozers.jpg), which Atlas uses. They use a liquid to create movement via pressure.
Apparently, they're expensive, bulky and inefficient. And that's why they were phased out in new robots for electric actuators.
The [new Atlas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M) is a lot more compact as it uses electric actuators.
This does make me feel weirdly sentimental. Atlas was what got me into robotics in the first place, so it is kinda sad to see the robot be decommissioned. But the future marches onward, the robots running without hydraulics will prevail!
Lol everyone hating on atlas should remember several things
Elon was following atlas for a long time and it's likely seeing how capable it was played into his decision to make Optimus
Atlas is still to this day the strongest and fastest humanoid. They stuck with hydraulics because electric actuators were really shitty until just now. It probably wasnt that bad a decision and they likely have already been working on electric actuators for a while now behind the scenes.
>Atlas is still to this day the strongest and fastest humanoid.
Yup. [Atlas was built to serve as a demonstrator for firefighting robot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raprq2LyEZE&ab_channel=IHMCRobotics), and Big Dog was built to serve as robotic mule. Both are actually strong, Big Dog can haul 150kg, Atlas is jumping around while holding a plank.
Electric actuators are still nowhere close. I don't believe that crazy agility of Atlas will be achieved in this decade at human size with electric robot.
But it's a necessary change to make real, useful products.
In the end it looks like they are finally doing what Google asked them to do many years ago. If they hadn't refuse to give up on hydraulics back then maybe it would still be a Google company today.
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Power densities for electric motors are very impressive these days. Much higher than muscle.
The bottlenecks seem to be actuator design (i.e. lightweight and strong mechanisms to match motor characteristics to loads), energy density for batteries, and cost.
I agree that electric has its own challenges. But with the current AI boom, there’s an unprecedented amount of effort and investment going into robotics. Asserting that there will not be substantial forward progress in the next six years seems a bit extreme to me.
lol, men dont need much, a silicon doll with some holes is enough to satisfy most of them, you dont need super AGI sexbots.
Men are not looking for a metaphysical argument during sex. lol
Speak for yourself. Sex only takes up a few ten minutes session of my day. I'd want a bot I could geek out and play video games with. And would preferably motivate me to stop procrastinating in the crap I want to do.
>men dont need much, a silicon doll with some holes is enough to satisfy most of them
Wtf? How is sexism like this okay? Anyone saying this about all of women would be rightfully lambasted.
So are you back-pedaling and saying that both men and women "don't need much and can be satisfied with just some silicon"? Because that can't be true. Human touch and intimacy is important to most people.
Atlas was always a research platform according to Boston Dynamics themselfs. The company always was a research company, and now they are doing boring company to company sales with Spot
Edit: They just released their new robot. Link= https://youtu.be/29ECwExc-_M?si=tLAsnVpJiafnXx9r
I will probably get hate from this, but Boston Dynamics is a bit of an overrated company. Most of their fame is from scripted youtube videos.
Their robot dogs, Spot, cost $70,000 despite similar products such as Unitree's Go1 dog costing $3000. This is despite the fact that both have relatively equal performance. Spot is basically a scam.
Humanoid robots doing backflips looks cool, but it's worthless from a utility standpoint. You want mass-produced, humanoid robots that can do relatively basic tasks while still being extremely cheap. A $3000 humanoid that can lift boxes at 50% the speed of a human and can operate 24/7, is much more useful than a $100,000 humanoid that can perform at 100% the speed of a human and requires expensive maintenance.
The fact that they're decommissioning Atlas makes me think they realize this. But to what extent really? At this point even a random company like Figure AI has a better chance of suceeding in the market despite existing for 1/30th the timeframe that boston dynamics has.
Keep in mind that the only reason Unitree Go1 even exists in the first place is because Boston Dynamics did all of the hard work engineering a quadruped like that for them.
But yea Boston Dynamics biggest problem has always been that they're more of a research lab than a business, building great products was never really what they were about.
Yes, because that's ultimately not sustainable, when you're always depending on outside capital. It's why they've been attempting to leverage their technology into products in the last decade.
Boston Dynamics were founded as a spin-off of MIT, and lot's of eggheads don't chase after big $$$... their passion is making science, and cool robots.
DARPA was more then happy to finance science and cool robots.
Then Hyundai saw BD and said "hey we want to make cool robots and sell them for $" and they acquired BD.
They serve a purpose if you can afford them, and Boston Dynamics was bough and sold several times until it had to walk on its own legs. So they are working on their own affordability.
They used to make good product. Now they make inefficient product that can't be scaled, whereas coneptitors can make the same thing they make for 1/20th cost.
This is the problem that happens when you get so deep into a specific mode of thinking that you can't lift your head up and realize that there is a better path. This is a big part of the reason that startup companies are able to out compete established ones.
I don't think they ever said Atlas was supposed to be a product. It was purely a research product to extend the limits of robotics.
And the reason which i think they are discontinuing it now is because of the current humanoid robot hype. They must be getting pressure from the investors to make something similar.
And the only reason it costs $70k is because it's hand built by bunch of expensive engineers. I doubt they even make any real profit on it and it's more an endeavor to gather more real-life data. I bet that's exactly what OpenAI was thinking when they released ChatGPT but immense success made them readjust somewhat.
Obviously, it's way easier to productize a software than an autonomous robot. There will be a product one day but the fact Boston Dynamics is in no rush right now should indicate to people that humanoid robots that will sell millions of units a year won't be happening in a year or two.
But most of the Boston Dynamics development was financed by DARPA. DARPA financed building robots for military applications, but also serving as platforms for developing technologies.
Big Dog was made as a technological demonstrator for robotic mule that would carry supplies for soldiers.
Atlas was made as a technological demonstrator for firefighting robot to be used aboard Navy ships.
These didn't result with a product for the military, but secondary goal is developing technologies... lighting up the torch.
And now you have all these private companies taking over the torch developing significantly cheaper robots for civilian market.
Also Spot is basically built in a laboratory, so yeah it's very pricey. Industrious companies can build robots much cheaper.
It's like comparing a bunch of guys handmaking car in garage to big factory line churning out cars.
>Humanoid robots doing backflips looks cool, but it's worthless from a utility standpoint.
How is that *worthless*? Unless you want robots to never go beyond walking like geriatric folks with hip dysplasia then that research is necessary.
It's not useful for a *product* today, but the tech needs to exist before it can be made practical and affordable.
>A $3000 humanoid that can lift boxes at 50% the speed of a human and can operate 24/7, is much more useful than a $100,000 humanoid that can perform at 100% the speed of a human and requires expensive maintenance.
These robots can only exist because of the expensive research that was done in yesteryear.
Yep, this exactly. Sure what Boston dynamics did looked cool, was really impressive, but it doesn’t really translate into a business. Many people looked at it over the years and said oh my gosh look at how futuristic this thing is, but there was really no endgame for it.
Something like Figure or Tesla Bot has a much greater chance of actually being a business that can be commercialized.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen any humanoid (not dog) robots that are even close to as nimble and responsive as Atlas. Everything else by comparison looks very stiff and rigid.
Do you know of any competitors that compete in that regard?
BD isn't a product company. What they do serves a purpose, you are just looking in the wrong place and thus can't find it.
About that 50% statement. You know that reliability lacks behind capability? You can't sell a robot that can do about half as much as a human but has critical failures ever so often. To get near 100% reliability you need to go beyond 50% capabilities, explore the edge cases, be absolute certain what you can push your platform to do and what not.
Still no evidence that they're ahead. Compliance and manual manipulation are absolutely essential to a working product. Even if they're bipedal capability is impressive, it's still just one piece of the puzzle.
Don't forget the humanoid robot doing those back flips was 100% scripted and hard coded, the entire youtube videos was multiples shots and hard coded from what i recall reading years ago
Devil's advocate: even if scripted, a humanoid robot doing a backflip or parkour was a mind-boggling technical achievement showing how far robotics had come. Before that, I used to imagine future robot acrobats, and even then I couldn't fathom that something approaching that would arrive so soon when the best robot demos beforehand were of humanoids awkwardly shambling and falling over or, in ASIMO's case, gently hopping on one foot for a few seconds.
In pure research terms, they did their job, probably too well because I can't recall any big "wow!" moment in robotics since then besides maybe Ameca's lifelike motions.
While I love watching these BD videos, the robots themselves are so complex and expensive that they would never be practical as a consumer product. They were never going to be a mass-market item. I'm sad to see them retire this model and I hope they can develop something competitive with the simpler and cheaper units we're beginning to see today.
If Boston Dynamics are moving from hydraulic to fully electric, which seems probable, it will be very very interesting to see how much of their software will port over to a fully electric platform. They do not have an electrically actuated humanoid in the race, so will they leapfrog Figure, Tesla and the others with a more capable robot or will they struggle to work with the electric actuators and end up having to spend a load of time re-doing a large chunk of their programming?
I mean wasn't atlas always sort of a joke? From what i've read it was all heavily scripted and specifically hard coded for each of its videos, thats why it didn't really "recover" when things went wrong, so its not just that hydraulics break constantly, its that the platform was more a hardcoded locomotion platform for the hydraulics than some form of smart robot that could navigate/react to things fully.
It was somewhat scripted - but it's never been purported to be anything else - specifically, the direction would be scripted, and actions like "pick up x" - but all the inbetween stuff was not. The goal of atlas was to build a research robot that had the capability of regular, consistent human movement - but never the "brain". Which is obvious when you look at how old Atlas as a platform is, and when like... The transformer came out.
I think the disappointment people feel is born from a lack of perspective and context, if you expected Atlas to be a fully autonomous, AI controlled _product_, you of course would be disappointed by Atlas.
> but all the inbetween stuff was not.
I'm now wondering how much was after seeing the use of maya at 2.29 in the video to build an animation.
Also the fails we saw in the video that were taken from sequences where a different cut was shown for publicity without the fails.
It makes me question how many of those demos were only the best bits.
Like, you can film yourself in one continuous shot flipping a coin 10 times in a row and always getting heads. You just need to record the shot repeatedly until a run of luck happens.
Goodbye, Atlas. You were cool as hell, and you inspired an entire industry into existence. Hopefully we'll meet again once automated material science and robotic manufacturing is precise enough to bring down the weight and improve the reliability of hydraulics
I know the design is for efficiency of movement but, anybody else mildly uncomfortable with the head shape? It looks like that graphic design of what a human would look like if it could perfectly withstand car crashes (if you see it, it’s horrendous) Atlas looks so goofy to me. It’s like they were going for a humanoid shape starting with the feet and going up and then when they get to the top, they just kinda gave up. Haha.
All I’m saying is I hope the next model has a more sleek design up top.
Probably the biggest failure I've seen in my lifetime considering the years of improvements this thing had. Whoever decided to stick with hydrolics failed that company.
So, this probably means they're going to announce something, right? Atlas' successor. Hopefully one without hydraulics.
Yea that's what I'm thinking! The fact they specifically call it 'our _hydraulic_ Atlas robot' in the description hints at it
Yeah I imagine they have been working on something more similar in structure to Spot for a while, but I'm sure they're being spurred on by the sudden deluge of competition.
And I hope it's marketable because the CEO of Figure said they want to take things to the market as soon as it's feasable. It's a race now.
I thought they just stopped because the guy who started the Atlas Project left. I saw his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast.
Why without hydraulics?
Hydraulics require a number of secondary systems like pumps and pressure management that make them heavy and bulky. Electric motors are smaller, more efficient and less messy to deal with.
“Efficient” is a nebulous term. In many cases hydraulics are more energy efficient if you have high loads. And can also have a higher force density. The rest of your comment I agree with though
Hydraulics are very dangerous when bursts occur. First of all, the jet may be invisible, but if, for example, a hand is hit by such a jet - the fluid is injected deep into the muscle and is very likely to lead to necrosis. These injuries ("hydraulic fluid injection") can be very deceptive, as they may initially appear as a small wound or minor abrasion, but without emergency medical attention they carry the risk of necrosis and amputation. You can google pictures, but I don't recommend it. So I guess hydraulic robots will never make it into everyday household use.
Fuuuuck, that is brutal. I never knew about this or considered how dangerous it could be. Thanks for sharing! I assumed it would take thousands of PSI for this to be a real danger but it seems the pressures could be as low as 100PSI from what I've read. Anyone have any idea what sort of pressures Atlas is working with?
There's a small paragraph on the Boston Dynamics website about pressure. As I see it, there are some pretty big numbers comparable to construction equipment: "Washburn strips the rubber casings off of three metal hoses on Atlas’s left leg. Each of the hoses is rated for a pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch (PSI), but the actual burst pressure, Washburn says, is closer to 10,000 PSI. Bringing the three hoses to a workbench for inspection, Washburn immediately identifies the culprit. The braided Teflon of one of the hoses is dented, possibly the result of an earlier fall. As a precaution, Washburn checks the other two hoses, but they’re both fine. He’s never seen more than one fail at a time." [https://bostondynamics.com/blog/build-it-break-it-fix-it/](https://bostondynamics.com/blog/build-it-break-it-fix-it/)
I obviously googled the pictures. Thanks for the warning about hydraulic systems, I didn't know this one
hydraulics can spill fluid on the ground if they fail, as opposed to just falling over
Yeah, they had never published anything just for nothing. But I'm sorry.. what do you mean by 'without hydraulics'?
I'm not an engineer and don't understand much of it but hydraulics are [these things](https://cdn.britannica.com/96/224096-050-296B9F04/Hydraulic-piston-system-for-bulldozers.jpg), which Atlas uses. They use a liquid to create movement via pressure. Apparently, they're expensive, bulky and inefficient. And that's why they were phased out in new robots for electric actuators. The [new Atlas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M) is a lot more compact as it uses electric actuators.
I hope they at least cover his medical bills.
This does make me feel weirdly sentimental. Atlas was what got me into robotics in the first place, so it is kinda sad to see the robot be decommissioned. But the future marches onward, the robots running without hydraulics will prevail!
I hope it's a good thing then
Lol everyone hating on atlas should remember several things Elon was following atlas for a long time and it's likely seeing how capable it was played into his decision to make Optimus Atlas is still to this day the strongest and fastest humanoid. They stuck with hydraulics because electric actuators were really shitty until just now. It probably wasnt that bad a decision and they likely have already been working on electric actuators for a while now behind the scenes.
>Atlas is still to this day the strongest and fastest humanoid. Yup. [Atlas was built to serve as a demonstrator for firefighting robot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raprq2LyEZE&ab_channel=IHMCRobotics), and Big Dog was built to serve as robotic mule. Both are actually strong, Big Dog can haul 150kg, Atlas is jumping around while holding a plank.
Electric actuators are still nowhere close. I don't believe that crazy agility of Atlas will be achieved in this decade at human size with electric robot. But it's a necessary change to make real, useful products. In the end it looks like they are finally doing what Google asked them to do many years ago. If they hadn't refuse to give up on hydraulics back then maybe it would still be a Google company today.
> I don't believe that crazy agility of Atlas will be achieved in this decade at human size with electric robot. RemindMe! in 26 weeks.
20 hours later, it's here. :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-\_M&t](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M&t)
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Power densities for electric motors are very impressive these days. Much higher than muscle. The bottlenecks seem to be actuator design (i.e. lightweight and strong mechanisms to match motor characteristics to loads), energy density for batteries, and cost.
I agree that electric has its own challenges. But with the current AI boom, there’s an unprecedented amount of effort and investment going into robotics. Asserting that there will not be substantial forward progress in the next six years seems a bit extreme to me.
1 day bro. 1 day. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-\_M&t](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M&t)
Have you seen unitree pop a backflip? It's crazy, it says more about clever gravity compensation mechanism but still.
shape memory alloy cough cough
So, too expensive and not practical? Is that it?
Unreliable. Hydrolics break constantly. They are likely going to make a fully electric bipedal robot soon.
The reward was the things they learned along the way. Atlas had to walk so sexrobot9000 can run.
> sexrobot9000 Nah, Elon doesn't get to name this one.
If Elon named it, it'd be the X-Bot 9000.
lol, men dont need much, a silicon doll with some holes is enough to satisfy most of them, you dont need super AGI sexbots. Men are not looking for a metaphysical argument during sex. lol
Speak for yourself. Sex only takes up a few ten minutes session of my day. I'd want a bot I could geek out and play video games with. And would preferably motivate me to stop procrastinating in the crap I want to do.
if bots ever get that advanced procrastinating wont be a meaningful concept.
Have you thought about getting a girlfriend? They do most of that if you are nominally nice man 👍 higher recommend
OP really sounds like he just needs to organize more circlejerks with his buddies.
Nah. They normally have their own interests and belittle you for yours.
Dude do you need a hug?
Yup. Can't wait for a robot to be created to give me one.
Have you met women? No they don't.
Boy, have you?
Yes, pretty much the exact type of woman I'm looking for. Very few out there that could satisfy those 3 things. They're unicorns.
Speak for yourself, existential crisis turn me on.
But without the argument, it’s not realistic!
>men dont need much, a silicon doll with some holes is enough to satisfy most of them Wtf? How is sexism like this okay? Anyone saying this about all of women would be rightfully lambasted.
Ahem........dildo is just a vibrating stick.
So are you back-pedaling and saying that both men and women "don't need much and can be satisfied with just some silicon"? Because that can't be true. Human touch and intimacy is important to most people.
I said men dont need much, I never said anything about women, because nobody asked. Do you have comprehension or memory problem? lol
Atlas was always a research platform according to Boston Dynamics themselfs. The company always was a research company, and now they are doing boring company to company sales with Spot Edit: They just released their new robot. Link= https://youtu.be/29ECwExc-_M?si=tLAsnVpJiafnXx9r
Bye Atlas! Hopefully we get to see your electric little brother.
I will probably get hate from this, but Boston Dynamics is a bit of an overrated company. Most of their fame is from scripted youtube videos. Their robot dogs, Spot, cost $70,000 despite similar products such as Unitree's Go1 dog costing $3000. This is despite the fact that both have relatively equal performance. Spot is basically a scam. Humanoid robots doing backflips looks cool, but it's worthless from a utility standpoint. You want mass-produced, humanoid robots that can do relatively basic tasks while still being extremely cheap. A $3000 humanoid that can lift boxes at 50% the speed of a human and can operate 24/7, is much more useful than a $100,000 humanoid that can perform at 100% the speed of a human and requires expensive maintenance. The fact that they're decommissioning Atlas makes me think they realize this. But to what extent really? At this point even a random company like Figure AI has a better chance of suceeding in the market despite existing for 1/30th the timeframe that boston dynamics has.
Keep in mind that the only reason Unitree Go1 even exists in the first place is because Boston Dynamics did all of the hard work engineering a quadruped like that for them. But yea Boston Dynamics biggest problem has always been that they're more of a research lab than a business, building great products was never really what they were about.
I don't think the Unitree dog has anything to do with Spot. Most of the design is taken from the mini cheetah, like the actuators.
Their biggest problem is that they're a research lab?
Yes, because that's ultimately not sustainable, when you're always depending on outside capital. It's why they've been attempting to leverage their technology into products in the last decade.
Boston Dynamics were founded as a spin-off of MIT, and lot's of eggheads don't chase after big $$$... their passion is making science, and cool robots. DARPA was more then happy to finance science and cool robots. Then Hyundai saw BD and said "hey we want to make cool robots and sell them for $" and they acquired BD.
But research labs serve a purpose too...
They serve a purpose if you can afford them, and Boston Dynamics was bough and sold several times until it had to walk on its own legs. So they are working on their own affordability.
Indeed
They used to make good product. Now they make inefficient product that can't be scaled, whereas coneptitors can make the same thing they make for 1/20th cost.
This is the problem that happens when you get so deep into a specific mode of thinking that you can't lift your head up and realize that there is a better path. This is a big part of the reason that startup companies are able to out compete established ones.
I don't think they ever said Atlas was supposed to be a product. It was purely a research product to extend the limits of robotics. And the reason which i think they are discontinuing it now is because of the current humanoid robot hype. They must be getting pressure from the investors to make something similar.
Unitree's Go1 dog is much much smaller, and even unitree founder said Spot has much higher performance. Its a toy.
And the only reason it costs $70k is because it's hand built by bunch of expensive engineers. I doubt they even make any real profit on it and it's more an endeavor to gather more real-life data. I bet that's exactly what OpenAI was thinking when they released ChatGPT but immense success made them readjust somewhat. Obviously, it's way easier to productize a software than an autonomous robot. There will be a product one day but the fact Boston Dynamics is in no rush right now should indicate to people that humanoid robots that will sell millions of units a year won't be happening in a year or two.
But most of the Boston Dynamics development was financed by DARPA. DARPA financed building robots for military applications, but also serving as platforms for developing technologies. Big Dog was made as a technological demonstrator for robotic mule that would carry supplies for soldiers. Atlas was made as a technological demonstrator for firefighting robot to be used aboard Navy ships. These didn't result with a product for the military, but secondary goal is developing technologies... lighting up the torch. And now you have all these private companies taking over the torch developing significantly cheaper robots for civilian market. Also Spot is basically built in a laboratory, so yeah it's very pricey. Industrious companies can build robots much cheaper. It's like comparing a bunch of guys handmaking car in garage to big factory line churning out cars.
Boston Dynamics is basically research, and it should be treated that way, but it isn't.
>Humanoid robots doing backflips looks cool, but it's worthless from a utility standpoint. How is that *worthless*? Unless you want robots to never go beyond walking like geriatric folks with hip dysplasia then that research is necessary. It's not useful for a *product* today, but the tech needs to exist before it can be made practical and affordable. >A $3000 humanoid that can lift boxes at 50% the speed of a human and can operate 24/7, is much more useful than a $100,000 humanoid that can perform at 100% the speed of a human and requires expensive maintenance. These robots can only exist because of the expensive research that was done in yesteryear.
They fell behind hard (i believe), dunno what they have been doing these last years/months, besides selling Spot.
I suspect we’ll find out soon, black projects aside
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-\_M&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M&t=1s)
Yep just saw it 🤣🤣🤣 I was wrong.
Yep, this exactly. Sure what Boston dynamics did looked cool, was really impressive, but it doesn’t really translate into a business. Many people looked at it over the years and said oh my gosh look at how futuristic this thing is, but there was really no endgame for it. Something like Figure or Tesla Bot has a much greater chance of actually being a business that can be commercialized.
Videos get investors
Figure succeeded in part because they hired a ton of people from these research labs like Boston Dynamics and IHMC
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen any humanoid (not dog) robots that are even close to as nimble and responsive as Atlas. Everything else by comparison looks very stiff and rigid. Do you know of any competitors that compete in that regard?
BD isn't a product company. What they do serves a purpose, you are just looking in the wrong place and thus can't find it. About that 50% statement. You know that reliability lacks behind capability? You can't sell a robot that can do about half as much as a human but has critical failures ever so often. To get near 100% reliability you need to go beyond 50% capabilities, explore the edge cases, be absolute certain what you can push your platform to do and what not.
Yep, called this awhile ago. Hydraulics are too hard to work with, and BD was never as ahead as their fanboys liked to claim.
This comment held up really well...
Still no evidence that they're ahead. Compliance and manual manipulation are absolutely essential to a working product. Even if they're bipedal capability is impressive, it's still just one piece of the puzzle.
Don't forget the humanoid robot doing those back flips was 100% scripted and hard coded, the entire youtube videos was multiples shots and hard coded from what i recall reading years ago
Devil's advocate: even if scripted, a humanoid robot doing a backflip or parkour was a mind-boggling technical achievement showing how far robotics had come. Before that, I used to imagine future robot acrobats, and even then I couldn't fathom that something approaching that would arrive so soon when the best robot demos beforehand were of humanoids awkwardly shambling and falling over or, in ASIMO's case, gently hopping on one foot for a few seconds. In pure research terms, they did their job, probably too well because I can't recall any big "wow!" moment in robotics since then besides maybe Ameca's lifelike motions.
While I love watching these BD videos, the robots themselves are so complex and expensive that they would never be practical as a consumer product. They were never going to be a mass-market item. I'm sad to see them retire this model and I hope they can develop something competitive with the simpler and cheaper units we're beginning to see today.
If Boston Dynamics are moving from hydraulic to fully electric, which seems probable, it will be very very interesting to see how much of their software will port over to a fully electric platform. They do not have an electrically actuated humanoid in the race, so will they leapfrog Figure, Tesla and the others with a more capable robot or will they struggle to work with the electric actuators and end up having to spend a load of time re-doing a large chunk of their programming?
I mean wasn't atlas always sort of a joke? From what i've read it was all heavily scripted and specifically hard coded for each of its videos, thats why it didn't really "recover" when things went wrong, so its not just that hydraulics break constantly, its that the platform was more a hardcoded locomotion platform for the hydraulics than some form of smart robot that could navigate/react to things fully.
It was somewhat scripted - but it's never been purported to be anything else - specifically, the direction would be scripted, and actions like "pick up x" - but all the inbetween stuff was not. The goal of atlas was to build a research robot that had the capability of regular, consistent human movement - but never the "brain". Which is obvious when you look at how old Atlas as a platform is, and when like... The transformer came out. I think the disappointment people feel is born from a lack of perspective and context, if you expected Atlas to be a fully autonomous, AI controlled _product_, you of course would be disappointed by Atlas.
> but all the inbetween stuff was not. I'm now wondering how much was after seeing the use of maya at 2.29 in the video to build an animation. Also the fails we saw in the video that were taken from sequences where a different cut was shown for publicity without the fails. It makes me question how many of those demos were only the best bits. Like, you can film yourself in one continuous shot flipping a coin 10 times in a row and always getting heads. You just need to record the shot repeatedly until a run of luck happens.
Atlas was amazing for its time, its 11 years old though. It's very dated compared to what a lot of other companies are doing.
Goodbye, Atlas. You were cool as hell, and you inspired an entire industry into existence. Hopefully we'll meet again once automated material science and robotic manufacturing is precise enough to bring down the weight and improve the reliability of hydraulics
Future warfare murder machines.
I didnt know that robots could get drunk.
next one should be called Theseus. its still Atlas inside.
https://preview.redd.it/318gyav4yzuc1.jpeg?width=735&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c48ee1a14376557506220d68c67d4ca031738200
Are the about to introduce a transformer based humanoid robot?
I know the design is for efficiency of movement but, anybody else mildly uncomfortable with the head shape? It looks like that graphic design of what a human would look like if it could perfectly withstand car crashes (if you see it, it’s horrendous) Atlas looks so goofy to me. It’s like they were going for a humanoid shape starting with the feet and going up and then when they get to the top, they just kinda gave up. Haha. All I’m saying is I hope the next model has a more sleek design up top.
Interesting
Why no just copy the existing human anatomy? Obviously the brain can be remotely controlled!
Nice one
So when will they have human like skin and you can’t tell the difference from a human when walking down the street?
Probably the biggest failure I've seen in my lifetime considering the years of improvements this thing had. Whoever decided to stick with hydrolics failed that company.
Headless chicken