NERDS KICK PUPPY 'bot in brutal attack K9 never had to put up with this type of thing: yowls of not-so-serious outrage have greeted the latest vid from bot-tastic US defence contractor Boston Dynamics. What the famous robotics outfit wants to demonstrate is that its latest product, Spot, has great stability and does a decent job of recovering from a momentary lack …
Damned impressive; Ray Bradbury's Mechanical Hound required eight legs...
The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.
>Their other projects are far scarier.
That depends on whether you have a secret stash of books or not! You should be kitted out with some 105" Samsung TVs like a good citizen ;)
That, I think, is where the boffins missed a trick.
What they should have done is programmed it to turn and face the source of the kick, and slowly advance - sneakily throwing in a speaker with a suitably nasty sounding growl to be played at that point as well.
All without telling the guy tasked with kicking it.
That would have been funny.
It's about time someone got the boot in - these pesky robots have already started treating us as a source of food...
That depends upon whether Charlie has had his mental development muddled by parvovirus or not. Here is a video of a one such canine cheerfully eating a police car. With police officers in it! He later shrugs off a couple of hits with a Taser...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAc9k7vJ9Zk
These robots were absolutely amazing... the algorithm they used for rebalancing was natural reactive and just all around well done.
There was a single thing I noticed which was a bit rough around the edges, it was when the sensors noticed it was about to come into range of an object which would require adjusting balance to climb or descend.
I have never played it, but I've watched my wife messing with a game called Clumsy Ninja on the iPad. It's the first and only time I've seen any automated system which actually has a natural flow for approaching objects which need to be climbed. What was most interesting is that the code didn't calculate surfaces based on the perimeter of the rigging during the approach, instead it clearly calculated based on the actual wireframe.
I believe this is what seems off to me about the dogs. I think that the software is calculating for the distance from the point of balance, instead of the point of contact and then compensating reactively.
These guys should really check that clumsy ninja, their collision and climbing physics are the most natural I've ever seen. While CN is for biped, the proactive collision management system should be able to be adjusted for quadrupeds.
They've made impressive progress, both in balancing algorithms and making it more compact. What I didn't see was what it would do if it took a downhill slope and lost footing. At some point, these things will take a roll, I would be interested to see how they would right themselves again.
This lot are owned by Google aren't they?
Look at who else they've bought recently...
Revolv - Home automation
Vision Factory - Artificial Intelligence
Dark Blue Labs - Artificial Intelligence
Jetpac - Artificial Intelligence, image recognition
Dropcam - Home monitoring
Alpental Technologies - Wireless technology
Titan Aerospace - High Altitude UAVs
Deep Mind Technologies - Artificial Intelligence
Nest Labs - Home automation
Boston Dynamics - Robotics
Bot & Dolly - Robotic Cameras
Holomni - Robotic Wheels
Meka Robotics - Robotics
Redwood Robotics - Robotic Arms
Industrial Perception - Robotic Arms, Computer vision
SCHAFT, Inc - Robotics, Humanoid Robots
DNNresearch Inc. - Deep Neural Networks
That's just in the last 2 years - They're building Skynet. Someone saw Terminator, and didn't heed the warnings. We're doomed.
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There was one brief segment where two of the robots were pictured walking together in step. Suddenly I had a vision of about a thousand of these critters emerging over a hilltop at dawn armed with dual 50 caliber Gatling guns and RPGs. I mean, "Can't we all just get along?"
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