The challenges of bipedal robots
Boston Dynamics is known for the flashy videos of its robots doing impressive feats. Among Boston Dynamics’ creations is Atlas, a humanoid robot that has become popular for showing unrivaled ability in jumping over obstacles, doing backflips, and dancing. The videos of Boston Dynamics robots usually go viral, accumulating millions of views on YouTube and generating discussions on social media.
And the robotics company’s latest video, which shows Atlas successfully running a parkour track, is no exception. Within hours of its release, it received hundreds of thousands of views and became one of the top-ten trends of U.S. Twitter.
But the more interesting video was an unprecedented behind-the-scenes account of how Boston Dynamics’ engineers developed and trained Atlas to run the parkour track. The video shows some of Atlas’s failures and is a break from the company’s tradition of showing highly polished results of this work. The video and an accompanying blog post provide some very important insights into the challenges of creating humanoid robots.
Read the full analysis on TechTalks.
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