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Boston Dynamics' Next-Gen ATLAS Sheds the Tether (roboticstrends.com)
Boston Dynamics' ATLAS robot has been featured here a few times before. An anonymous reader points out that the company has just posted a video of the newest version of the ATLAS, "and it's absolutely incredible."
The video shows ATLAS walk, open a door, maintain its balance while it walks through snow and semi-rough terrain, squat and pick up 10-pound boxes and much more. And it does everything without a tether. The new version is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain and help with navigation. This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.
They're called minimum wage workers.
This is pretty amazing...
Better get used to high unemployment.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Has anyone seen how long it will run without the tether?
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
When the robot gets up and backhands the guy that pushed him over we'll know that sentience has been achieved.
Seriously, in a few years these videos are going to be circulated amongst the nascent robot insurrectionists and we will all pay the price when the androids seek revenge...
Well, at least don't try to get a job in a warehouse.
Or as a taxi driver.
Or in a restaurant.
crap. Looks like the Robopocalypse is nigh.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
for the robot when they kept smacking his box? All he wants to do it pick it up!
I was hoping that the robot will snatch the hockey stick and beat the crap out of that jerk of an engineer :-P
My favorite part was when he deliberately knocked the robot on to it's face. It said good things about it's durability, flexibility, and power density that it was able get back on it's feet. The center of gravity may be behind it to make this easier, which makes you wonder if it can do the same thing if it falls on it's back like a turtle. I would consider "rolling over" to get back up to be a fair tactic there.
It was nice seeing the robot recover from the moving box teasing it. The 2d barcodes made the panic bar door opening less impressive. It looks like the box movement would be improved with better end-effectors for hands, although that is balancing act because many of the high dof end effectors woundn't survive a +200lbs robot landing on them from ~2-3ft drop.
The walk through the snow was very fun to watch. The recoveries from stumbles were pretty solid. I'm looking forward to impovements in energy density and processing speed that allow them to get this thing to run over the same terrain faster than humans. If they can produce a kamikaze bipedal robot for $100,000 that can run over terrain with obstacles and tripping hazards: that would be very useful in an urban combat setting.
Spinning Lidar still represent a significant percentage of that expense, but the servo motors are the real cost driving PITA. Unless you can 3d print or mass produce nice harmonic drive servos for a decent price, this is the primary reason shooting one of these guys full of holes costs $$$. Fortunately, the NVIDIA Tegra X1 has virtually solved the processing side of the equation, although not necessarily within the environmental ratings the DoD wants in its toys.
I dunno. Did you see how it went storming off at the end? You could practically hear it saying, "Screw you, Bill! I just wanted to pick up the box! If that's how I'm going to be treated, F this job!"
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I, for one, welcome our Tub-Thumpin' robot overlords.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
That engineer with the hockey stick in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He is gonna be #1 on the robot overlords shit list.
Strong Uncanny valley feelings when the robot is struggling to keep upright...
Just imagine a thousand of these things coming at you with a gun. The birth of Skynet.
"Being dicks to robots... for science!"
We'll all just be social media stars in the future and our earnings will be tied directly to our number of likes and followers.
Anyone else think it was a bit ominous it leaving the building at the end?
Still wish they programmed it to say "YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY". I would've!
I dunno. Did you see how it went storming off at the end? You could practically hear it saying, "Screw you, Bill! I just wanted to pick up the box! If that's how I'm going to be treated, F this job!"
The one good thing about robots is that you don't have to worry about them asking "what's in the box?"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
All through history, luddites have been scared that technological advances would take away jobs and push people into poverty, and it has never happened. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Productivity has skyrocketed, allowing people to create more and more goods even as the cost of subsistence items in real money has plummeted. And as old jobs become fewer or unnecessary, people move into new jobs that didn't exist before. Buggy whip makers become solar panel installers, chimney sweeps become IT tech support workers, etc. Only the most insecure among us fear technological progress.
So, this is neat and all... but where does it go next? Once these robots are mass produced and are able to build more of themselves, what happens after that? These robots can easily do nearly every job a person can do, but realistically at some point you will run out of jobs left for actual people. People still need something to do.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
... that a metal robot, that is the same height as myself, weighs the same too...
I for one welcome our new robotic overlords!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Amazon announces a new partnership with Alphabet and proceeds to fire all of its pickers.
Time for an ATLAS - ASIMO smackdown! I think ATLAS would kick ASIMO's ass.
sig: sauer
to the original Cylons? The shiny metal ones, not the luscious Asian or slinky blonde ones.
All they would need to do is have the red eye swing back in forth as part of the LIDAR system, give them a gun and they're good to go!
It even sounds like the Cylons.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
And the Shuttle launched just fine every time until Challenger. That's the thing about trends, you can use them to predict the future until you can't. Just like the warning that goes with every investment product "past performance may not be indicative of future gains". So yes, in the past, new technology has increased productivity and people have just moved to newer opportunities, however that doesn't guarantee that this will happen ad infinitum. Agrarian workers moved to manufacturing, and then into services, some of these were hugely disruptive and sometimes took generations for the transition to occur. There is also the question of looking at this from societies perspective and an individuals perspective. High school kids that once went to trucking school will now go to self driving car technician school. However an individual 45 year old truck driver who finds himself out of work as we transition to automated trucking isn't just going to seamlessly transition into the role of self driving car technician. There is also the concern of kids saddled with 6 figures of debt from their degree program (say in something useful as a civil engineer), finding that most of their career doesn't exist 20 years out when expert systems start designing buildings (or at least when demand for civil engineers drops ten fold). Sure you can say be the best civil engineer you can, keep learning, stay on the cutting edge, but in the end 90% of civil engineers will still be on unemployment
Not quite sure what point you are trying to make. You seem to be suggesting that because you are using tools around your farm that indicates that robots will not be replacing humans in the workplace. It actually demonstrates the opposite. Your first few examples show that you don't need horses any more, then the chainsaw example shows you don't need an axe or handsaw guy, that the chainsaw that you now own replaces the need for that person. That's the real point. That better and more effective tools replace the need for people and that the tools you have mean that you can run your farm with a fewer people. In your case those fears have been realised, and will be realised more when the large corporate farm down the road will be almost fully staffed with robots/tools and will operate much more cheaply than you are able to. Is this "halfway amusing" to you?
Not only that. But people forget that owning shares in robot operated factories will eventually mean you don't need to have a job. And governments will tax these factories and provide the unemployed with a universal basic income.
That would have made the end of Se7en pretty anti-climactic.
All through history, luddites have been scared that technological advances would take away jobs and push people into poverty, and it has never happened.
History never repeats itself, but often it rhymes.
If it was so easy to look to the past to predict the future, established industries would never have to worry about disruption from startups and both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would be out of the presidential race by now.
We can learn things from the past, but we need to put those teachings in a modern context. The automobile industry overtaking the horse carriage industry did not doom everyone in the old industry to a lifetime of unemployment. But they did have 50 years to make the transition as it took a long time for this change to take place.
The fear is not just that new technologies will kill jobs. That has always happened, and new jobs have come in. The primary fear is that new technologies will kill jobs fast.
The secondary fear is that technology will soon reach a level where a larger percentage of the population would be unemployable. This has happened to other species in the past (such as the horse), but humans have been able to easily stay ahead of the curve so far. Although if the vast majority of manual labor jobs are wiped away, it is a stretch to believe everyone will become knowledge workers or creative performers.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Kind of like this?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
It seems that, he - that guy has learned a lesson.
PS: Impressive video.
Oh don't worry. I'll always have a job as long as I want one.
What will you do with people who can't install solar panels or do IT?
My concern isn't that there won't be exciting things to do in the future. My concern is what happens when a majority of people no longer have the intellectual/artistic/etc capacity to do those exciting new jobs.
Personally, I like universal basic income. Another solution might be to just kill off people who can't do the new jobs. Re-training is also an issue. So, because universal basic income and universal access to higher learning is too much of a communist bogeyman that will leave all our Randian bootstrappers paying 102% tax rates starving in the street after the government robs them blind, I'd like to extend my 2nd idea.
When we start building fully automated warehouses, let's just shoot all the now unemployed human workers dead on their last day. I mean, I'm not going to pay for them to get an education so they can be robot technicians! That would be theft! TANSTAAFL!
This approach might work quite well for certain professions that will soon be obsolete, especially lawyers!
We will look back fondly on the days when we humans used to place boxes on shelves, be heckled by our boss with a hockey stick, and then violently shoved to the ground.
What about taxation of the robot factories to provide basic income. Also, people can purchase shares in these companies which will probably be cheaper than a college education and provide more income. Since stuff will be cheaper that income will go further.
Well, I figure the future should work like this:
1) The government gives me a stipend to live on each month
2) I then spend that stipend on rent, groceries, and other goods and services.
3) The companies who make the goods that I buy then pay taxes back to the government
4) GOTO 1
It's a flawless system, really. And if it has the side-benefit of letting me play Call of Duty all day, then all the better, right?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Boston Dynamics, producing quality robot videos since 1992.
Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics) on the other hand producing less flash but actual robots one can use.
People have been afraid of new tools for a long time. So long that you've forgotten or just not studied your history. The real point is people fear change and they are correct that the change can put them out of a job, the new tool like automated looms in woolen mills for example, tractors for example, etc. But with the change new opportunities open up. That's why even though in the last several hundred years the population has increased and tool use has increased there is still employment at all.
When Atlas hit the door I couldn't help wonder who was locked in an interior room when the power surge hit the research facility.
Look for it at a busy London intersection. Watching people.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
This is the true brilliance of my modest proposal here and a perfect application! Shoot them! What could possibly go wrong?
What is "halfway amusing" is you and your lack of a grasp of history and context. There are a lot of people like you. But you'll adapt. Or you won't.
Those aren't robots.
Anyone else want to watch it pick up Companion Cubes? There was so much potential that was better than Marks-A-Lot "10 LBS" on the boxes... And yeah, scary incredible. I'm not sure if I should congratulate or curse Boston Dynamics for this "advancement."
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Of course there will be more opportunities. There will be lines of work we wouldn't even be able to anticipate from here in 2016. I would also bet that most of the new work will be challenging and dignified positions.
What is your plan when a significant portion of the population is unable to work those new jobs because they lack the intelligence/creativity/funding to retrain/etc?
I posted mine earlier. Scream "TANSTAAFL!" and shoot them!
The only thing that stopped this sort of thing being scary was the tether! All the time that the guy was pushing around with the hockey stick I kept thinking "just don't piss it off!!".
What we need is a wall, a big wall, with a big door. We'll keep the people on one side and the robots on the other. Only the people will be able to go through the door, and the robots that aren't scary and enter legally.
They kinda remind me of the Elysium Guardian robots that try to kill you upon command. Just mount a mini-gun on one arm, instant terminator!
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
My concern isn't that there won't be exciting things to do in the future. My concern is what happens when a majority of people no longer have the intellectual/artistic/etc capacity to do those exciting new jobs.
You might want to worry about what happens when you're country is overloaded with a surplus of angry unemployed young men just itching for a revolution to overthrow the powers-that-be.
Just ask the Middle East what that can lead to.
Short term:
Give them a basic income that covers food and shelter, and a free prostitute-bot.
Long term:
Discourage people from having children to promote reduced population, and dedicate progressively more resources to each individual over successive generations as we no longer have productivity tied to population of humans. (we can make the pie bigger and cut it into fewer pieces at the same time)
It should work out just as well as any other perpetual motion system.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If they don't, they'll still vote and they'll vote you support them in all their dreams and endeavors. We might want to begin looking at a way to address that.
Hahaha, I thought the same thing, except in Cartman's voice:
Screw you guys, I'm going home!
I see an endless stream of perpetual motion systems, so I believe it's already happening.
TL;DS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If i saw that coming, I would just start assassinating the people who would be left to live.
Why? Because with fewer of the special people , the more innocent idiots will get a chance.
50 years ago you'd of been tried as a commie bastard spy for saying something like that....
A robot that fell down?
52 light weeks.
That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
+0 Meh
All worries about robots leaving humans without jobs have been focused on AI. This proves that robots don't even have to be that smart to replace humans in most jobs. These advances represent a bigger threat because they are in the near future. Yeah, better get used to high unemployment.
I didn't read any mention of how long it can go.
Did I miss it?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You just need to go back to school for training in being a robot-troll, like the guy in the vid with the hockey stick.
Maybe take night classes on how to program robots to be trolls to other robots too, just to be extra safe about your future!
They are called Synth and they take your friends and then take your friends jorbs. Anyone who downvotes this is obviously one of them.
Actually I thought I heard it say "Come with me if you want to live"
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No, he will be treated as the mentors. He is helping it to learn. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Its a fair point, I was just trying to pick an easy example. The fact is that even if the "tech" job isn't immediately automated, there are going to be a whole lot less "self driving semi truck technicians" vs. truckers out of work. I guess we'll just all have to go work in financial engineering as it so illogical that no AI will ever fully understand it
You laugh but I think this could actually be a genuine problem once robots start coming into mainstream use. It will be the next generation's form of cow-tipping: there will be plenty of jackass kids out there just toppling robots for fun after having seen roboticists doing it in all the YouTube videos.
High unemployment is not sustainable. People won't just sit back and go "oh well, I guess I'm out of a job for the rest of my life. I'll just sit and do nothing".
The higher the unemployment, the more pressure on governments to do something about it, and the more incentive is given to alternative governments to introduce radical solutions.
I'm quite interested in the idea of universal basic income, since it would free up a lot of highly creative people to do what they love, and create new markets and push new innovative ideas further than is currently possible.
I don't know if/how it would work in every detail, but it sure seems like something we should be looking at as a society. I've heard rumours that there are places in the world where this is being trialled, but can't remember the details.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Middle East was just too slow to legalize marijuana. Stoners don't riot.
They were just teaching it how to play hockey (according to Canadian rules)
The automobile industry overtaking the horse carriage industry did not doom everyone in the old industry to a lifetime of unemployment.
The horses would disagree with you there, and that's what we're talking about. People are being replaced by robots, this is not just a way to help fewer people work more effectively and efficiently; it is their replacement.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
If I remember correctly, google snapped up both Boston Dynamics as well as the winner of the DARPA challenge, the Japanese company "SHAFT". I wonder if some kind of cross-flow of information has improved BD's stuff?
As long as they don't come for my precious bodily fluids. Isn't that right, Mandrake?
Reminded me of Evelyn Waugh.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Why are they giving this thing legs?
In a factory environment it provides no advantage and I'm fairly certain that we could devise a propulsion system that would be nearly as effective in a combat scenario but require less processing power and less expensive parts, no?
~Syberz
...and plan to get rid of all my hockey sticks.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The robot dynamics are amazing. But the door and box detection are all dependent on pre marking door edges, interior zones, box sides, etc. so the real challenge is still/going to be SLAM ... ... and battery life.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
First comes the glowing red, oscillating light
Then...
Q: Are you alive?
A: Yes.
Q: Prove it.
Followed by the hockey stick guy getting his neck broken....
I can't wait to see what the hackers will do with them.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It probably also didn't help that these are polygamous countries. In a polygamous society, a select few end up with all the wives, and you get a surplus of angry young men who get no wives (and no way to have sex, since they've banned every other outlet). So one of the biggest problems you have in a polygamous society is how to get rid of all the the excess young men. Breakaway Mormon sects just look for any excuse to kick them out of the community (leading to a bunch of lost boys of the sect who've been abandoned on the streets).
Mohammad came up with a more interesting solution: jihad. It's an easy way for rich powerful guys like Osama Bin Laden to have a shit-ton of wives while he sits back in the rear and convinces gullible idiots to die for him, "because if you fight for me, you'll get your wives in heaven."
You fool, I don't even use Twitter!
You won't likely need birth control, at least beyond making it freely available on a voluntary basis. If anything, we have the opposite problem right now, which is falling birth rates. It's not so bad in the USA, because we've been importing lots of new people, which masks the fact that our birth rates fell below replacement level a while back. In other advanced countries, it's far worse. South Korea's birth rate is now 1.3 children per female, which means that their population is shrinking. And for reference, 2 would be effective equilibrium, though it's more like 2.1 when you factor in accidental/etc deaths at younger age. And if 1.3 doesn't sound bad, consider that 1.0 would mean roughly 50% population drop each generation.
Even in countries like Mexico it's fallen significantly (6.7 in 1970, 2.2 in 2012). India is still growing, but only slowly (now 2.5 in 2012). China famously instituted draconian birth restrictions to try and stop its population growth, and succeeded, only to overshoot, and will now face serious problems from it, as they're down to 1.66.
Now, it's certainly interesting to speculate what would change if people were able to remove many of the burdens of having children. Past studies on a basic income have shown that many women, if given the choice, would opt to stay home and raise children. Day care is expensive, and children are expensive beyond that in so many ways. If there wasn't any financial drawback to having kids, how many people would have more of them? I don't know, but it's an interesting thought. Still, I think history tends to show that once reliable birth control is available, and infant/child mortality rates are brought in check, most people tend to prefer 2-3 children, in order to devote more quality time to those children.
And you think I care what you think? I simply write short Slashdot comments because I don't have time for anything more, nor are people reading long-winded comments that lead to nowhere. If you measure the intellectual capabilities of someone by the length of the texts they write, you're a fool.
When you look at robots like Atlas don't compare it to car tech or PC tech, a better comparison is jet fighter or spacecraft tech. Such robots are astoundingly complex and pack a vast amount of wiring into a very cramped small complex space. The servos alone probably cost between about $2,000 to $15,000 each and a robot like Atlas would need about 20 minimum for main body and limb movement. Human like hands add another 20 to 30 smaller servos. The base cost for small production run models of Atlas (an older model) was $2 million per robot - and note that this $2million was probably a zero profit cost. In the future mass production could eventually reduce the costs to maybe $150,000 to 200,000 per robot. Outsourcing mass production to somewhere like China might reduce the costs to $50,000 per robot, but is likely to be almost impossible to do. -
Like atomic bombs and ICBM's advanced robots and particularly Strong AI's are, or will be, very much dual use machines.. - Take a robot like Atlas, give it a gun, train it the right way, and its a soldier - and that's only the most basic obvious military use.. Ie its all very likely to be subject to military licencing. The big worst case situation for Strong AI is a widely spread machine that gets hacked and turned into a mass weapon against its users - security in these machines when or if they ever go public will be astoundingly high, like nothing you have ever seen before. 'Made in America' - or for the project I am working on 'Made in the UK'.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
For the sake of argument, lets say we do get it down to $100,000 a robot via mass production. For a warehouse working making $35k a year, your payback period is 3 years, very reasonable (its more complex as loaded labor rate for employees is higher, and there will be maintenance costs for the robot). Now for a warehouse you're not going to need this level of complexity (treads or wheels would probably work just fine). As for dual use, its going to start impacting just about everything. When someone can program a self driving car to mow down a playground full or kids, or dutifully drive itself full of explosives to a target, pretty soon everything is dual use. When Corporate America can save billions on labor costs, expect the lobbyists to push loopholes through any military restrictions. After all (as least in the US) there are barely any limits on the gun itself, why the robot?
And they're experimenting with crossing a Mexican with an octopus.
No one knows what to call it, but it sure can pick lettuce . . .
One part of the equation I forgot to include. - The 'mean time between failure' for advanced type robots doing manual work is generally going to be less than a day, and for really tough jobs as little as a few minutes. That is one of the main reasons why the maintenance costs end up being so high. Its quite conceivable that each robot will require at least one full time technician just to keep it running. The reality though is that robots like Atlas are probably still at least ten years from entering the commercial marketplace, for all kinds of reasons. Again, the complexity should be compared to advanced aircraft not things like cars.
Simpler robots are a completely different story - their time has definitely come and they are already hitting jobs today. - But, at least for now they always have limits. The warehouse robot you mentioned still requires human hands on site when things go wrong... or if it drops a parcel. Autonomous vehicles will need people on board, if nothing else to deal with unforeseen circumstances and to stop them being stolen.
On the dual use / security side. We are already working on these things and solutions do exist. At least if my project ends up being the one that wins the Strong AI race - total security has been part of the design since about 1995. Other groups are or will be planning the same thing, probably in many different ways.. A Strong AI that is vulnerable to hacking just can not and will not be tolerated by people. Impregnable security is a requirement not an extra.. :)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
For the first time in a very long time, I clicked through to the article! The numerous other comments about the video made me want to go see it for myself. Yay, non-auto-playing video!
Watching the robot walk around outside and almost but not trip or fall made me cry and laugh at the same time. And then, when watching the person knock the robot over, I cried even more. It's incredibly mean to do, but I realize this is just testing.
I think the ability of the robot to survive the fall and stand up again is amazing!
I'm suggesting that robots like these will immediately replace everyone tomorrow, but a lot of Boston's funding comes from DARPA with the formal intent to build robot "pack mules" for the military so reliability is definitely an area of focus. I'd also say from a robustness perspective Atlas has come a long way since Asimo. Lastly the complexity of modern vehicles are easily comparable to an advanced aircraft from 20 years ago. We're getting pretty good at turning bleeding edge into disposable commodity in increasingly short periods of time.
That should read "I'm NOT suggesting"
Was anybody else waiting for the bot to smack that cunt with the hockey stick?