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Leaked Video Shows New 'Nightmare-Inducing' Wheeled Robot From Boston Dynamics (theverge.com)
Boston Dynamics has a reputation for building robots which push the boundaries of robotics technology, although with a slightly creepy persona. Its latest robot is no different. From a report on The Verge: The company's new wheeled, upright robot is named Handle ("because it's supposed to handle objects") and looks like a cross between a Segway and the two-legged Atlas bot. Handle hasn't been officially unveiled, but was shown off by company founder Marc Raibert in a presentation to investors. Footage of the presentation was uploaded to YouTube by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson. Raibert describes Handle as an "experiment in combining wheels with legs, with a very dynamic system that is balancing itself all the time and has a lot of knowledge of how to throw its weight around." He adds that using wheels is more efficient than legs, although there's obviously a trade-off in terms of maneuvering over uneven ground. "This is the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot," says Raibert.
Whut does I win?
That's not nightmare-inducing at all. That's pretty cute. I shall call it Stumpy-wheels, and i shall use it to guard my house from idiots, children, and idiot children.
So many years have been spent trying to make a robot than can walk. However, this is better. This is a robot that can roller skate. It's faster than walking or running, but just as agile!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Bot, meet your robot overlord.
Daleks run on wheels, but they have a weakness, stairs. (Well except until they learned to levitate) Wheels need a flat surface whereas walking legs do not.
Just in time for Season 3 of Code Geass!
Me: "Boss, I'd like raise."
Boss: "Sorry, no budget this year."
Me: "My robotic friend back here wants a word with you..."
[*Lunge!*]
Boss: "Aaahhh! OK, OK! you gottit! Now get that thing outta here!"
Table-ized A.I.
How long will it take until they will put a gun on it?
(And use it to control the population?)
Yeah, that has the potential to peg my Creep-O-Meter.
If I met that thing in a darkened warehouse and it started coming for me I'd be shittin' me pants.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Usually when I consider if a purchase is worthwhile, my first question is: "Will this give me nightmares?"
Impeach Donald Trump Now !
This letter may be a bit overwhelming for those people who are still soundly asleep in a world of make-believe and television and who don't want to hear how Donald J. Trump should have been removed from the gene pool before he had a chance to contaminate it. Let me cut to the chase: Trump proclaims at every opportunity that he'd never defuse or undermine incisive critiques of his macabre behavior by turning them into procedural arguments about mechanisms of institutional restraint. The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks. His subalterns are unified under a common goal. That goal is to legitimate irresponsibility, laziness, and infidelity. Continue to appease Trump, and he will surely kill innocents in cold blood. We need to deal with him appropriately. Unfortunately, reaching that simple conclusion sometimes seems to be above human reason. But there is a wisdom above human, and to that we must look if we are ever to make the world safe for democracy.
Trump whines about longiloquent putterers, yet he enthusiastically supports self-righteous gossipmongers. His cock-and-bull stories are a logical absurdity, a series of deductions from a premise that has been denied. Speaking of absurdities, Trump can't fool me. I've met bossy poseurs before so I know that honor means nothing to Trump. Principles mean nothing to Trump. All he cares about is how best to pose a threat to personal autonomy and social development.
Trump's maudlin preoccupation with particularism, usually sicklied over with such nonsense words as âoemicrocrystallographyâ, would make sense if a person's honor were determined strictly by his or her ability to monopolize the press. As that's not the case, we can conclude only that Trump fully intends to promote intolerance and paranoia. But that's not enough, not for him. Trump will additionally prevent us from getting in touch with our feelings, which is why I avow that it is impolitic, dangerous, degrading, and unjust to evade responsibility. For that reason, it would be wrong to imply that Trump is involved in some kind of conspiracy to bake us a cake of imperialism, filled with credentialism and topped with a layer of faddism. It would be wrong because his diatribes are far beyond the conspiracy stage. Not only that, but once in a blue moon, which is still far too often, one encounters the lie that we should avoid personal responsibility. A quick way to refute this myth is to note that Trump's activities are a cancer that gnaws away at the national psyche. To say anything else would be a lie.
It's easy to see that Trump and his hangers-on are blossoms on the upas tree of desperadoism, but let me tell you the rest of the story: Many of us are too naÃve and trusting. It takes a lot of convincing to get us to see a person as inherently liberticidal or inherently tasteless. Alas, Trump is doing all he can to provide us with unmistakable proof that he is inherently both. For instance, Trump professes that he could do a gentler and fairer job of running the world than anyone else. Has anyone, at any time, ever been more wrong? We should be able to look into our own souls for the answer. If we do, I suspect we'll find that Trump gets a lot of perks from the system. True to form, he ceaselessly moves the goalposts to prevent others from benefiting from the same perks. This suggests that Trump recently made the astonishing claim that we can stop hucksterism merely by permitting government officials entrée into private homes to search for ornery, contemptible brownshirts. Stripped of all its hyperbole, this statement is really just saying that Trump says that his socially inept, drugged-out gang is a benign and charitable agency. You know, he can lie as much as he wants, but he can't change the facts. If he could, he'd doubtlessly prevent anyone from hearing that I have in fact told him that his machinery of panoptic control seems to have no bounds. Unfortunately, there really wasn't anything to his response. I suppose Trump just doesn't want to
FTFY
Handle what? Knives? Swords? Throwing stars? Guns?
Holy shit I know! HUH?!? He IS awesome. I'm SO glad he's president now. Although I'm thinking that your "wanting him to dip his balls in your mouth" is a bit over the top.
fuck this world is full of fucking retards
I really wish they would stop calling it a "leaked" image or video when it was simply just released. "Leaked" makes you think ooh it was recorded by some spy who clandestinely shared the video to show you want evil BD has been up to! Instead, we come to realize it was just a BD released commercial trying to raise VC. Cool as the video may be, it wasn't a leak. There's no stopping the spin, I guess, so I will have to replace "leaked" with "released" in my mind but it's just a pet peeve like "I could care less" or asking who is "they".
Meh. If you want to give slashdotters nightmares, make one that looks like Summer Glau....
... and more useful just to give a two-legged robot a Segway?
This is not nightmare-inducing.
THIS is:
https://saturn3makingof.com/photo-gallery/saturn-3-hectors-brain/
Reminded me of the wheelers from Return to Oz for some reason...
Yeah, but like copyright* expiration, we won't it in our remaining lifetime.
*see what I did there, pretty proud myself...
CAP === 'frieze'
Impeach
Like Clinton was impeached? I don't even think you know what that word means, so why should I trust you?
Why don't you wait until after you finish your high school civics class before posting. It's usually taken in your senior year of high school.
It would be one thing, if we were digging up ancient general purpose robots and having gone nowhere with them over thousands of years, decided that they weren't that exciting. That would be rational. But to declare that they can't be done merely because they haven't been done before is colossal ignorance. Virtually everything we do today, beyond the rudimentary level of basic life processes, is something that at one point hadn't been done before.
KEVIN!
STOP tormenting the robot.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
... then someday you might get clean the robot that fixes that robot.
...
i could live a little longer in this prison
I want my Battlemech now. I'm going to get in line at the Apple Store tomorrow. This has to be brought to market.
This thing will result in a mobility revolution for the disabled. Once it's in production and cost comes down. And.. Stairs will be no problem. it balances well enough that half a dozen different solutions should be available (a deploy-able post would be easy)
they're doing a revival of "Starlight Express"?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
On condition that that's not fake, that machine is positively badass. I have the most profound admiration for the technology that went into it, and the engineers that did this job.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
GIF is sped up. the video is at normal speed
on this massive black hole of funding that is Boston Dynamics.
Robots on wheels have been around for years. Does Boston Dynamics really care about Robotic Design? Is this the result of a group of H1B Zombies trying desperately to keep their jobs?
Boston Dynamics, your all a bunch of fucking smart asses; show this, "a walking robot that goes up/down stars carrying a feather duster and Shark vacuum. Then let the creative juices flow and have it dust and sweep the floors. Do you guys really care?
Yeah, after Google dumped them it's clear they aren't producing anything useful at all. Of course, two seconds of looking at their videos with a critical eye would make it obvious these robots are not going to be useful. These things are to robots what Segue is to transportation.
It has wheels. Wheels re useless in combat.
That's the extent of the nightmare? Jeeze. You get your news from the same place Hollywood gets its movies these days. All crap-stream.
Looking at the headless shoulder, the empty arms and wheeled legs, it definitely has some creepy factors.
But DAMN, this thing does better than most robotic designs at moving around at high speed. Heck, it can even spins and jump!
All I'll need is a car shell and BAM! I'll have my own transformer! Nightmare => Best Dream Ever!
+1 to the Engineers.
GIF playback speed is inconsistent between browser brands and PC's in experience.
I suspect it's because although time between frames is standardized in the GIF standard, the frame render time adds additional implementation and hardware specific time gaps that are either not accounted for, or compensated for differently in diff browsers.
For example, in normal video playback, if the rendering can't keep up with the stated frame rate due to slow hardware or taxed CPU, frames may be partially or fully dropped to keep the average timing proper. Animated GIF's don't seem to do this; they just run slow.
Table-ized A.I.
Meh, it's no ED-209, looks more like something from Wallace and Grommet.
Nullius in verba
I saw the video on the page of it moving and jumping and I immediately thought about robotic horses. It could be so cute, every kid would want one.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I don't know. Give it a gun and see what happens. It could be useful
I agree, it's really quite graceful. The pirouette reminded me of figure ice skaters.
Link to a youtube video for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sarah Connor will rain on your parade once she gets back.
Requiem for the American Dream
Go post your crap somewhere else.