Some awesome real life working robots

Occasionally I like to have a look at what DARPA publicly admit to funding. Two organisations that they fund are the Masachusets Institute of Technology, and a company called Boston Dynamics (they might be the same company, I don't know). But anyway, I love some of the technical innovation that's emerging from it all.

Check out these actual real robots.

 

A bit more of an explanation. Plus more robotic awesomeness.

 

They are scarily life like!

 

Robotics is a passion and hobby of mine. Some ten years ago now I built a combat robot and today I own (because I built it) a house robot that responds to my voice commands. It can recite the three laws of robotics and play my favorite tunes when requested to do so, amongst other things. Boston Dynamics are extremely impressive but until they turn their creations into 'cute' which they could do very easily, most of their builds do indeed induce nightmares. Their funding body probably don't want cute though but why they aren't voice activated, is a bit strange

 

I can only speculate. But I can think of a couple of good reasons.

1. There's no secret that these machines are being built for front line combat support roles. Things like carrying heavy equipment to save soldiers fatigue, extracting the wounded etc. I expect in that situation it might be reasonable to expect a lot of background noise from gunfire perhaps, or people yelling. It would take a fair bit of audio processing to filter out the human voices from all the noise, and then to retain enough fidelity to actually pick out an authorised voice from any other.

On that same note, you don't really want a situation where an enemy can simply tell your equipment to run away.

And the last theory I have is much simpler. Speech recognition is getting a bit old hat. Everyone is doing it. If you're researching pioneering new tricks, and you have the best team for it, why waste that team's time on stuff that's already been done? If they want speech recognition they can just buy it in at the last minute. For now they are focusing on achieving stuff that hasn't been achieved already.

 

Having heard some of my colleagues trying to talk to their mobile phones and get sensible responses; I can well understand why voice recognition might not be the best control mechanism for robots in a noisy situation.
Voice control doesn't necessarily work with people either.

 

Truth is.. it hasn't been mastered properly yet and thus ancient remote control tech is still being used.

What's that? War mongering by apes that still haven't worked out that murder promotes murder. OH. And Nikola Tesla, the father of remote control would laugh from his grave to see how far we haven't come with robotics.

 

Nikola Tesla had an extraordinary brain. Amazing, the things he thought of.

 

I'm sorry. I thought I'd started a thread showing impressive technology.

We could debate whether or not the civilised nations should end all defence spending while others are putting AK47s in the hands of 8 years olds and throwing gay people off tall buildings, but I think that's a debate for another thread. This thread is about undeniably impressive technology. If you are not impressed by it, may I suggest you present something better?

 

@clueless1 You are right.

What I see with Boston Dynamics is, it's proprietary and closed access with hard robotics, old tech remote control hardware, and is funded by the US military. The only thing they are advanced with is their actuators, but even those can be taken out with just one bullet.

What I see as impressive robotics includes neuroinformatic systems with soft robotics and self assembling nanoskin with voice recognition and open development. Voice recognition could never reach its full potential whilst voice chips power consumption remained at 1 or more watts. Recent chip development has now reduced that to between 0.2 and 10 milliwatts.

For me, undeniably impressive technology depends on its use case.

 

Sometimes I feel like a robot.

Sometimes I think websites suspect I'm a robot ...

 

Preparing to interface with you now

 

That's not even true.

Their robots can recognise objects by 'sight', and can adjust to work with them automatically. They can adapt to unexpected circumstances, like uneven surfaces, skidding over, being knocked down, being kicked off course etc.

They are not merely remote control either. A remote might be used for testing high level functions like running and turning, but it's their AI that takes those high level instructions and implements them. In the case of their big dog robot, which is meant as nothing more than an equipment carrier, that's not remote control, it follows the person it's told to follow and will choose it's route variation based on the terrain.

We must also remember that these are primarily designed for front line military use. That opens up a whole new bag of ethical questions. There is some international agreement that a war fighting machine may not make high level decisions that could amount to choosing a target or choosing whether or not to kill, but may us AI to assist it's human operators in the low level stuff. That would be why these very clever machines can adapt to local conditions and terrain, follow it's operators, and work out how to do as it's told. What they can't do, and must not do, is choose they're own objective.