Not only can Atlas dance better than humans, but it also can jog, jump, vault, and even do backflips.
We already know that Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robot, Atlas, can dance better than most humans. But now, it’s one-upping the humanity another time . Boston Dynamics has unveiled a video that shows off Atlas’ shocking parkour skills.
Atlas’ Athleticism Astounds Viewers
The video shows two Atlas robots running through a course, American Ninja Warrior-style, showing off their coordination when hopping from platform to platform, trekking across a beam, and even doing two very impressive backflips.
In an accompanying blog post on the Boston Dynamics blog, the Hyundai-owned company noted that the routine wasn’t accomplished within each day.
It took months of tweaking from the engineers involved. Even still, the performance still wasn’t entirely perfect. The robots stumbled a touch on certain moves, like when one among the bots made a tiny misstep because it proudly pumped its arm towards the top of the video.
Boston Dynamics stated that Atlas had made tons of progress since its previous videos, which show Atlas and friends performing a dance routine. Therein a particular video, engineers were testing Atlas’ ability to string together a routine—the robot wasn’t responding to its environment in any way.
But Atlas’ parkour demonstration has everything to try to to with the robot’s spatial awareness. So instead of programming each move individually, engineers were ready to get Atlas to acknowledge certain objects, like platforms, then react appropriately.
Unlike Spot and Stretch, Boston Dynamics’ commercial robots, Atlas is simply an experiment. Spot has been utilized in police settings (and was subsequently sent back to Boston Dynamics), while Stretch is made to assist out around warehouses.
“Ultimately, pushing the bounds on a humanoid robot like Atlas drives hardware and software innovation that translates to all or any of our robots at Boston Dynamics,” said Scott Kuindersma, the Atlas team lead. “We’re not trying to unravel everything all directly . The work we’re doing now’s allowing us to make a solid foundation for tackling subsequent set of research problems.”
In other words, Atlas is here to pave the way for the opposite bots in Boston Dynamics’ arsenal, also as for any future robots to return.
How Far Will Boston Dynamics Go?
For anyone worried that Atlas’ progress might be a sign of an imminent robot takeover isn’t getting too worried just yet. Like we mentioned earlier, Atlas still isn’t ready to reliably perform every jump, step, vault, and flip without flaw.
So, for the nonce, rest assured that Atlas won’t steal any Olympic gold medals for gymnastics anytime soon.
