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DARPA's Atlas Walking Over Randomness
mikejuk writes "Considering how long we have been trying to solve the problem, a robot walking is mostly amusing. Atlas is an impressive robot, evoking the deepest fears of sci fi. Watch as one of the DARPA challenge teams makes Atlas walk, unaided, on randomness. This video of Atlas was created by the Florida Institute For Human and Machine Cognition robotics team. It shows Atlas walking across a random collection of obstacles. Notice that even though it looks as if Atlas is supported by a tether, it isn't — as proved when it falls over at the end."
Those flat board feet are no match for the terrain. A few metatarsals would go a long ways toward stabilizing its stance on uneven surfaces.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
It's understood perfectly. It's just very very hard to simulate, as there are many muscle groups involved from your toes up to your head and your shoulders, all moving in a coordinated effort. Getting it exactly right on a robot is - hard.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The most recent Big Dog video shows that this is a (largely) solved issue for quadrupeds. The middle of the video shows it walking over stumps, navigating a swingset, and so on.
Still, "four legs good, two legs better". Or so they say...
The summary is an impressive bit of (unattributed) quoting from the article, evoking, the deepest fears of comma abuse.
hardly...
It might freak the cat out in a similar vein to a vaccuum cleaner but wathcing the video makes me feel worried *for* (not of) Atlas
I'm sure it's an amazing technical achievement but just highlights how much further we have yet to go.
Shouldn't the random obstacles include human skulls?
also, pretty much every human being would make sure to not step on any of those obstacles, mainly because they don't want to trip and fall. Who seriously sees a corridor full of wood and goes "fuck it, i'll just stroll straight over all this"? You don't, you look to make sure you're stepping on solid ground. Sure, there's times when you do have to tread on uneven and unsecured surfaces, but then you take even more care on where you're going. This robot doesn't seem to have the logic to do this, and that's where they're going wrong.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
That's the amateur version from the Florida Institute For Human and Machine Cognition. Here's the pro version from Boston Dynamics, showing some walking over rocks. The balance control is better, the walking is faster, and the arms and torso are being used more effectively for balance.
The "DARPA Humanoid Challenge" teams are struggling along. They had to write their software to run in a poor simulator, then use it on the real robot, with a competition next month in December. So the control software is crude. Most of the team efforts seem to be going into the perception side. Performance in the simulated humanoid challenge was poor; the best team fell down about 12 times. This looks like they're still using the basic balance controller from Boston Dynamics for control. Entrants in the competition get a closed-source .so file that will operate the Atlas robot for a few basic functions (slow walk, stand, etc.) for debugging purposes. This isn't the good stuff; Boston Dynamics keeps the better algorithms a secret. Entrants are supposed to replace those algorithms with better ones, but since they've only had about two months with the real robot, that probably hasn't happened.
In a year, this will probably suck a lot less.
No human has vibrating feet.
I beg to differ. Try this experiment. Place a thick pillow on the ground, or perhaps two. Stand on these pillows with one leg and no other support for one minute. If your pillow stance is unstable enough, your foot will have to move around rapidly to maintain your balance, since by not being able to change the location of your foot on the pillow, you must instead change the orientation of your foot. I suspect that this robot is actually testing specifically the ability of ankle joints to maintain balance, since there is almost no side stepping visible on the part of the robot. The Boston Dynamics robots referred to in other posts often seem to rely mainly on sidestepping for balance, and often have peg legs instead of feet and ankles. This robot seems likely to be a proof of concept of one particular method of balance that in future robots will be combined with other methods of balance.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
The first attempt at DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous car race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge) made it less than 12km before getting stuck - in 2004. Now only nine years later people are talking about the imminent arrival of driverless vehicles.
I've made that point before. I was at the 2004 DRC (and in the 2005 one). The 2004 DRC was pathetic. It was covered by the Comedy Channel. The Ohio State entry (a huge Oskosh truck) ran into a parked vehicle at slow speed and pushed it for a while until DARPA people finally sent it an emergency stop signal. The CMU approach was to have a semitrailer full of people at workstations doing detailed manual path planning. The CD with the route was released an hour or so before the start, so their people had a short period to plan the exact path, using recent high-res aerial photos. DARPA's competition chief, an active-duty USMC colonel, found out they were pre-planning, and so, the night before, a few of his troops went out and moved some obstacles. This was the result. CMU's vehicle plowed right through a highly visible sheet metal fence. They were the most successful team. The others did much worse.
Then in 2005, there were 23 teams with working vehicles running around the California Motor Speedway, none running into anything. The second day of the 2005 Grand Challenge was the day the press suddenly recognized that automatic driving was real.