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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.
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...
Shouldn't the random obstacles include human skulls?
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.