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Boston Dynamics Wildcat Can Gallop — No Strings Attached
Boston Dynamics has been making eye-catching (and sort of creepy) military-oriented robots for several years, and we've noted several times the Big Dog utility robot. The newest creation is the untethered, gas-powered Wildcat; this is definitely not something I want chasing after me. (Not as fast as the previous, tethered version — yet.)
Kinda reminds me of my ex, actually. Fast, noisy, high maintenance.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
great to recreate a horse ... but engineering is NOT bound by natural selection ... why not innovate? perhaps it's a fundamental issue with how engineers think?
"That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Horse? Not even close.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
You can't order a horse to carry gear to specified coordinates unattended. Horses don't climb rough terrain particularly well either.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Because if you strap a bomb to it, and then blow it up, someone will complain...
Yes, and journeys in early motorised carriages could have been done quicker and cheaper using horses. ;)
Not very good at the old forward-thinking thing, are you
...really smart people creating things - "war machines" to be blunt - that will wind up killing someone on some battlefield somewhere (probably the Middle East and North Africa). If BD were creating robotic devices for peaceful purposes - a "dog" for the blind, a robot that can do some old lady's shopping for her - then I would be applauding the effort/brilliance on display here. But building clever war machines? Sorry, but this isn't something intelligent, conscientious people would even dream of working on. So its "boo combat robots" for Boston Dynamics from me, rather than "yay cool robots"... My 2 Cents. Feel free to disagree...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
"That horse is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you give it a lump of sugar."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
there is no nuclear reactor design that could power that thing like a gas engine can.
If there was we could have nuclear powered electric cars.
I really wish people could understand that. the small nuclear reactors could power a laptop or two for 30 years but could never produce enough electricity fast enough to run a clothes dryer for one run.
Second,
people see horse or mule and can't conceive of a horse or mule getting scared of bullets flying by and or getting shot. using a horse to carry your gear only works until the horse gets shot. then the horse runs away with your gear.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Robots probably cost a lot less in the long run. Think of the industrial horse farms that would be needed to supply the military. A small assembly line could crank out thousands of these a month.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Why not just use a horse? Costs less, more reliable, powered by renewable resources ... the horse.
And edible.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Horses were better than early cars. So they shouldn't have developed cars?
I could see advanced legged robots being useful in search & rescue in rough terrain, unexploded ordinance disposal (think IEDs), and several other applications. I'd like to take some of this company's robots and engineers out to our training area, Disaster City.
Surprisingly, horses are not very good at running long distances. In fact, people can run long distances faster than horses. The switchover point in that contest is around the length of a marathon. This robot can run a sub-4-minute-mile, but more importantly, there is every reason to think it could be made to sustain that pace all day.
I really wish people could understand that. the small nuclear reactors could power a laptop or two for 30 years but could never produce enough electricity fast enough to run a clothes dryer for one run.
You know, people would be more likely to understand that if we could stop this business of calling RTGs "reactors". The concept of a "reactor" (whether chemical, biological, or nuclear) is usually that it provides some form of support for a reaction to take place which otherwise would not take place, or would only take place in a different, less useful/safe/something way.
Radioactive decay is not in any meaningful sense a "reaction", and would be happening to the Pu (or other "fuel", if you're using something different) whether or not it's in the RTG, at essentially the same rate, generating the same amount of heat. The only thing the RTG does is feed the decay heat through a heat engine (typically a Seebeck device, but there's some work using a Stirling engine), to extract some work from the heat flow -- no reaction, so it's no reactor.
Ordinarily, I'd call such a distinction as this useless pedantry, and not engage in it, but you're correct that there's a problem with people being ignorant about RTGs and thinking they have capabilities they don't -- and since I'm convinced the general habit of calling RTGs "nuclear reactors" contributes to this, I think it's a distinction worth making.
Because billions of years of evolving something that is incredibly good at what it does isn't deemed "high tech" enough
Evolution is slow. Evolution goes by trial and error rather than absolutely optimized engineering design and QA, and doesn't have any kind of recursive ability so as to improve its own methods. Sure, give it billions of years and the absolute minimum optimization capability and it'll make something that works pretty well, up to and including the human brain, but that's it. Now, give those human brains a solvable challenge and they'll work it out in a matter of centuries, if not decades, years or even just months.
So, sure, right now horses are better, after all nature got a few hundred millions years advantage before allowing us to start running, but we're catching up, and fast, very, very fast. In a few decades no living thing other than human beings will have any advantage left over our technologically-developed alternatives. And then it'll come the time for technology to outgrow even that last remaining bastion of biological-over-technological superiority too.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I would argue that developing forms of robotics for the battlefield (autonomous or not) has a huge potential to reduce hostility. Decision making on the battlefield in person has to take into consideration enemies, civilians and friendlies, and a naturally increased hostility is present due to the personal risk involved. With robots you can forget about the personal risk forget about friendlies and concentrate on separating civilians from hostiles, it makes combat one dimension simpler.
Also robots can be sent into situations that would be suicidal, plain immoral, or not physically possible for human soldiers... go down this street with enemies hiding amongst civilians and don't shoot until you get really close because your more likely to kill a civilian, that's not really a situation you can send a human into successfully without ether huge risk to civilians or a huge risk to friendlies.
It's a sharp tool that can be used far more accurately than a blunt one such as a bomb. Something that is likely to stop stupid military decisions like preemptive strikes with massive civilian casualties, because there is another option.
I'm not saying i trust the hands of whoever these tools end up in, but the potential for good is as great as the potential for bad as with most technology.
This. Horses are a real PITA in the field. Fuel is bulky, they're heavy. Hard to drop out of planes (successfully anyway). They don't always do what you want them to do (Whoa Nelly!). They resent being shot at or blown up.
Of course, these aren't all that practical yet. It's basically electronic animal 101. But BD has some impressively cool tech. Their big problem is the energy source. Internal combustion engines are just so 20th century.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Maybe we should invest in researching mind-control helmets for donkeys, then.
Okay, that was a joke, but perhaps an automated mechanical rider (that operated the reins and stirrups) would almost be practical...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Lets look at it this way:
Horses take a long time to mature. These things take a week or two to assemble (assuming they go through QA procedures, environmental, shock & vibe, etc.)
Horses can go for couple days or more on food. This thing only a couple of hours.
Horses spook easily and less easily with training. These will never spook.
Horses can follow simple commands. This can follow complex commands,
Both need fuel and water. Horses need lots of support by bringing their food/water to the battle field. But a lot of us are forgetting another project: EATR. With the addition of this tech and a gun, this new robot can run around, hunt, kill, and devour victims as a fuel source.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Because no one will give you $500 billion dollars if you tell them you want to move stuff around with horses!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Philosophically speaking, evolution doesn't even have to produce something "good" at what it's supposed to do. So long as it's "better than the other species" to guarantee a survival advantage in a particular role, then it's good enough. The metric for evolution is not excellence but survival. I still think this device is a silly waste of money though. There is not one thing it can do that can't be done better by existing technology, it's a mediocre re-invention of the wheel.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's pretty much false. At the President's Cup, in Abu Dhabi, the record is 160 km in 6 hours, 21 minutes. Average speed, 25 km/h. That's faster than world record marathon runners go. It's in 6 stages, each longer than a marathon itself, but all in a single day. I don't think you'll ever see a human run 160 km in a single day, averaging 25 km/h while moving.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So whenever I read about things like this, my initial reaction is "what are they thinking?" followed by abject disgust for anyone involved in the project.
WTF? Turn in your (wo)man card. Like an overpowered sports car or a gun that shoots through schools, the outrageously excessive badassery of this thing has an appeal all its own.
For every smoking clanking roaring polluting autonomous quadruped you refuse to build, I'm going to build two.
There is not one thing it can do that can't be done better by existing technology, it's a mediocre re-invention of the wheel.
That's true of any technology on its origins: steam engines, electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, computers, fission, networks. What matters isn't what it can do now while it's still a crude 1st or 2nd gen prototype, but the whole set of developments that can be imagined deriving from it down the line, and even more so those that cannot be imagined. For example, think about all the things that wheel- and steering-based robot's can't do now but legged ones could, or all the hazardous environments living beings can move through but are extremely hazardous to them, or all the disabled people around who would be able to move if connected to this kind of technology as replacement for their missing limbs or organs or whatever. For those applications to happen though first someone must spend the money to develop the crude versions and learn from those the basic techniques that'll then enter the recursive process of exponential improvement. If that someone is the military, well, so be it. Down the line it'll be civilian applications, as is always the case.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
You complain about how fuel for horses is bulky, then object to using an internal combustion engine (which runs on the most convenient fuel known to mankind)? That does not make sense.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I really would like to see them make one like a cat that can run, crouch and leap like a cat can. then we will have something that is fearsome.
That requires a different approach to control than the one they're using. All the Boston Dynamics quadruped robots start up by trotting in place, then extending the stride.
"Maybe we should invest in researching mind-control helmets for donkeys,"
Because congress would kill funding thinking it would be used on them.
"I'd like to take some of this company's robots and engineers out to our training area, Disaster City."
Which Disaster City? There's quite a few just in the USA alone.
Shielding makes it impractical, no matter how small a reactor can be -- stopping 50% of rays/particles of a given type and energy takes a certain thickness of shielding. So basically, supposing that the intensity of radiation scales linearly with power, the shielding required to reduce that to a constant level scales with ln(power), so half the power doesn't let you use half the shielding. Ignoring shielding (for the sake of discussion)... it might be possible, but it's still a very difficult problem; the reactor core itself doesn't scale down very well either, and to convert the resulting heat (say, ~200 kW) into mechanical energy (say, ~40kW, enough for a car of modest performance), you still need a heat engine which will unsurprisingly be roughly the size of a 40kW heat engine already used -- so you don't even have the entire engine compartment to shove your reactor in. At best, you're taking a large car, shoving a economy car engine in it, and trying to cram a nuclear reactor into the space left over. Good luck with that.
Helicopters got known as mobile weapon platforms because they were easy to hide. You fly in *under* the terrain (not subterranean, but under the peaks in that area, and possibly even below treetop level, some were known to have followed roads cut through forests), then pop up to shoot missiles, then drop below the terrain before return fire can be brought to bear.
The problem with helicopters is that small arms can bring them down. A helicopter armored to the level of an A-10 will not get off the ground. The mule is the UGV. Deliver ordinance to a location unmanned and without human risk. As a support vehicle, they are not yet ready for prime-time.
Learn to love Alaska
I thought the noise was a safety feature, to warn people to get the fuck out of the way of the infernal contraption.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I consulted Wikipedia about bone names: in a cat (and many outer quadrupeds) the tarsal joint forms what is the "knee" in our legs, and the metatarsals are the lowest segment of the leg. The joint happens to point backwards, and consequently it looks "right" to us, and a robot with its knees pointing forward looks "creepy".
The Boson Dynamics people obviously found that it's somehow beneficial to have that joint pointing forward rather than backward, and they have the freedom to engineer it that way. Nature doesn't have that freedom: Evolution frequently "chooses" second-best solutions where the "design penalty" is small, because evolution always works in infinitesimal steps, there is no chance of atop-to bottom rewrite, the process doesn't cater for that.
Take that, "Intelligent Design" believers.
I know what you mean by reasoning with it. I once brought my horse to some water, and by gum no argument I could devise would make it drink.