New BigDog Robot Video

John860 writes "The US company Boston Dynamics has released an amazing new video of its quadruped robot BigDog. The highlight of the video (at 1:24) shows how the robot starts slipping on ice, almost falls several times, but finally regains its balance and continues walking. The video also shows the robot's ability to cope with different types of terrains, climb and descend steep slopes, and jump. Two years ago, the older version of BigDog was already able to climb slopes, keep its balance after a strong kick, and walk on rough terrain like stones, mud, and snow. The new version weighs 235 lbs and can carry a payload of up to 340 lbs, a factor of 4 better than its predecessor."

Comments

Creepy

[GodfatherofSoul]

Is anyone else creeped out by how natural the movements of this robot are? Maybe it's the lack of a head and the ominous buzz-of-death, I don't know. As I recall, there's some theoretical curve for robots where the human acceptance of a robot dramatically drops at a sweet spot as reality is approached and doesn't rise until reality is achieved. This robot definitely falls in that zone for me.

Re:Creepy

[lendude]

I found the anthropomorphic factor of this robot thru' the roof, mostly I think because of its movement characteristics. It immediately reminded me of an old German Shepard once in our family, particularly the sequence on ice when it badly slipped: it looked exactly like our poor old shep when his back legs went on him. Man, I almost shed a tear at that point of the vid!

They may have to think about toning this aspect down for war time scenarios - I can well imagine soldiers going to 'old yella's' assistance when he comes under fire!

Simply Amazing.

[Sterrance]

It reacting to a kick was so lifelike I wanted to call Peta. I frankly don't see the actual use in war, besides transporting things, I can't wait till they make toy versions.

This is bigger than you think

[Oddster]

Robot locomotion of that quality is probably one of the most difficult problems to solve - the robustness of that thing was quite impressive - it survived rubble, snow, ice, and a solid kick that sent it tumbling. I'd really like to know how they did it, if they just managed to perfect current techniques with enough DARPA money or came up with something new - I would imagine it required some very accurate sensors and actuators, and a super-high-precision inverse-kinematics solver. If they can couple that together with a super-accurate local navigation system - which I imagine would be the easy half in comparison - then they've got a huge platform to launch consumer-grade robots if they get to a low enough price (and they do something about the noise). Maybe I will have a robot butler in my lifetime, but it looks like the military gets their mules first.

Cool, yes. Useful?

[goodmanj]

This is a pretty cool tech demo, but at the moment, its battlefield utility is zero. That two-stroke engine buzz is going to alert every bad guy for miles around.

Since it needs to be able to exert pretty big forces very quickly, I doubt they're going to lower the power requirements, so I highly doubt they're going to be able to use a quieter power source like batteries or fuel cells. Nothing beats the power-to-weight ratio of internal combusion.

Me, I'd go with a real live mule instead for all applications you'd use this in. Same payload capacity, not much bigger, totally silent, self-refuelling, costs $hundreds rather than $hojillions.