DARPA's Atlas Walking Over Randomness 76
mikejuk writes "Considering how long we have been trying to solve the problem, a robot walking is mostly amusing. Atlas is an impressive robot, evoking the deepest fears of sci fi. Watch as one of the DARPA challenge teams makes Atlas walk, unaided, on randomness. This video of Atlas was created by the Florida Institute For Human and Machine Cognition robotics team. It shows Atlas walking across a random collection of obstacles. Notice that even though it looks as if Atlas is supported by a tether, it isn't — as proved when it falls over at the end."
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We do have a shortage of engineers. There's a distinct shortage of engineers willing to work unlimited hours for laughably low wages under demoralizing petty authoritarian management, after spending years of their life and racking up $100+K in debt on the promise of decent employment. This shortfall is made up for by the H1B program.
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You mean the army of robots will decimate humanity, retrofitting our needs to what we can produce?
The joke aside, your robots do not produce energy, they consume it.
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Cut down the population by 75% and the problem will solve itself.
No: Asimo was useless. THIS is a huge step forward (Score:2)
Japan's Asimo robot was a ridiculous dead-end: perfectly controlled to essentially run scripts over well-known terrain with virtually no uncertainty or randomness. A real bipedal walking ro
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How utterly useless.
It's better than any bipedal robot you've ever developed.
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Nope, I'm the guy who belittles when others sneer and deliver their opinions as fact.
The robot.. (Score:1)
... trips at the end. The real problem is that how walking works in humans isn't understood. If it was we could simply apply the model via mimicry to bi-pedal human like robots.
The vibration of the robots feet is probably the most jarring aspect of the video. No human has vibrating feet.
Re:The robot.. (Score:4, Insightful)
No Lordosis (Score:3)
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"It's understood perfectly. It's just very very hard to simulate"
The two things don't go together. If it was understood as perfectly as you claim you could take apart the understood model and make simple versions of it that work. i.e. if you are in possession of the fundamental principles of bi-pedalism in all environments you can then reduce complexity because you understand the fundamental concepts of walking given any set of normal human terrain.
We haven't got anywhere near that with robotics, so to sa
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There are a bunch of things we think we know how we could do them, if only we had the [material, machines, power] to build them. We can describe what we need, but not how to make them.
Of course, often times it seems that once we get those things, we get to move on to the next part of the problem we didn't see before.
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Sure. Robot would have to
-look at the ground
-understand whats on the ground, flat vs obstacles
-understand solid vs movable/soft obstacles
we are barely at step 2 nowadays, even for quite predictable environments like roads.
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also, pretty much every human being would make sure to not step on any of those obstacles, mainly because they don't want to trip and fall. Who seriously sees a corridor full of wood and goes "fuck it, i'll just stroll straight over all this"? You don't, you look to make sure you're stepping on solid ground. Sure, there's times when you do have to tread on uneven and unsecured surfaces, but then you take even more care on where you're going. This robot doesn't seem to have the logic to do this, and that's where they're going wrong.
What? That completely misses the point of this entire excercise.
The point is to design and test a system that is capable of walking across such obstacles, just like you are, when it does become necessary. Once such a system is implemented, it will still make just as much sense to design the robot to avoid obstacles when it can, except now it can still keep going when it can't.
In other words, these guys are trying to design a better support and locomotion system for future robots, instead of making a robot t
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No human has vibrating feet.
Then again, no human is born with metal feet with no sense of touch
Sensory Feedback (Score:1)
Then again, no human is born with metal feet with no sense of touch
Yes, I always wonder if this isn't the root cause of failure to get robots to walk well. Granted, I'm sure someone's about to "OMG why would you think that experts wouldn't think of stuff like that" me on this, but I note that when I'm standing, I seem to mostly rely on my sense of pressure from my feet. I want to keep my center of mass over the center of my feet, so when the front of my feet feel more pressure than the back, I push the front of my feet down to cause me to lean further back, and of course
Re:The robot.. (Score:4, Insightful)
No human has vibrating feet.
I beg to differ. Try this experiment. Place a thick pillow on the ground, or perhaps two. Stand on these pillows with one leg and no other support for one minute. If your pillow stance is unstable enough, your foot will have to move around rapidly to maintain your balance, since by not being able to change the location of your foot on the pillow, you must instead change the orientation of your foot. I suspect that this robot is actually testing specifically the ability of ankle joints to maintain balance, since there is almost no side stepping visible on the part of the robot. The Boston Dynamics robots referred to in other posts often seem to rely mainly on sidestepping for balance, and often have peg legs instead of feet and ankles. This robot seems likely to be a proof of concept of one particular method of balance that in future robots will be combined with other methods of balance.
The feet need some complexity (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The feet need some complexity (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially if placed inside bean bags for weight distribution -- Like an elephant's.
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Notice that even though it looks as if Atlas is supported by a tether, it isn't - as proved when it falls over at the end.
...and then proceeds to hang by its tether.
... with its center of mass at a lower altitude than when it was walking, thus proving that the tether wasn't supporting* it before, yes?
*I'm aware that proves it wasn't entirely supporting it, and there'd need to be some assumptions made about how elastic the tether is to prove it wasn't supporting it at all, but given that the point of such a tether is to arrest a fall before robot meets concrete, and also to not impose any force before the fall, I think it's reasonable to suppose it actually does that.
Inflexible feet (Score:3)
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Big dog recent video (Score:5, Funny)
The most recent Big Dog [youtube.com] video shows that this is a (largely) solved issue for quadrupeds. The middle of the video shows it walking over stumps, navigating a swingset, and so on.
Still, "four legs good, two legs better". Or so they say...
Impressive (Score:4, Funny)
"evoking the deepest fears of sci fi" (Score:3, Funny)
hardly...
It might freak the cat out in a similar vein to a vaccuum cleaner but wathcing the video makes me feel worried *for* (not of) Atlas
I'm sure it's an amazing technical achievement but just highlights how much further we have yet to go.
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Scariest looking military humanoid robot yet: PETMAN. It is used to test protective clothing in hazardous environments instead of using people (if the suit breaks!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0 [youtube.com]
Something missing.... (Score:5, Funny)
Shouldn't the random obstacles include human skulls?
Difficult terrain (Score:1)
Difficult for a human to walk over those objects. A human would look down at the ground, and position their feet between the obstacles, or just walk around them. My wife would probably clear the stuff off the floor.
I'm sure if I attemped to blindly walk across the bits of wood, rope and pebbles, I would probably trip over too.
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My wife would probably clear the stuff off the floor.
Made my night!
When Atlas Attacks. (Score:2)
im sold (Score:2)
hell it made it father then i would have over that crap...bravo Darpabot!
I, for one, welc...oh shit that's right.
nevermind.
Not bad, (Score:2)
but how well does it handle a pile of human skulls?
Robots that look like humans... (Score:2)
But they are all missing the point. The flat feet need to go. If you want to build a robot that walks like a human, give it human feet, give it an arch, give it toes, those are all important to how we walk and balance.
Give it a body structure like ours, and it has a chance to walk like us. Why fight mother nature?
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Why do robots have to be bipedal? (Score:2)
I mean, it's obvious that they're REALLY BAD at it. Hardly any animals are bipeds, in comparison to the amount of quadrupeds, especially.
Why not play to robots' areas of strength and just stick with wheels/treads/rotors/wings/etc., and worry about more advanced forms of locomotion later? I understand that humans want robots that look and act like humans, I suppose, but how about coming up with more practical designs?
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There are several advantages to a humanoid robot in terms of the robot being able to function in a human-centric world (drive vehicles, use tools, navigate buildings etc.)
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Because the world is built around bipedalism (because humans built cities, buildings, etc). If you want to navigate a modern city, two feet generally will get you everywhere, while the other forms will get you limited access at b
Atlas? (Score:2)
no adjustment (Score:2)
Notice that every pace was exactly the same. There was no adjustment to place the foot in a better position. Just walk a pre-set pace and hope it can balance on the random spot the foot comes down. People do not walk that way and we fall down a lot less. I would also like to see that robot try to stand if it fell on it' back.
Here's the pro version (Score:5, Informative)
That's the amateur version from the Florida Institute For Human and Machine Cognition. Here's the pro version [youtube.com] from Boston Dynamics, showing some walking over rocks. The balance control is better, the walking is faster, and the arms and torso are being used more effectively for balance.
The "DARPA Humanoid Challenge" teams are struggling along. They had to write their software to run in a poor simulator, then use it on the real robot, with a competition next month in December. So the control software is crude. Most of the team efforts seem to be going into the perception side. Performance in the simulated humanoid challenge was poor; the best team fell down about 12 times. This looks like they're still using the basic balance controller from Boston Dynamics for control. Entrants in the competition get a closed-source .so file that will operate the Atlas robot for a few basic functions (slow walk, stand, etc.) for debugging purposes. This isn't the good stuff; Boston Dynamics keeps the better algorithms a secret. Entrants are supposed to replace those algorithms with better ones, but since they've only had about two months with the real robot, that probably hasn't happened.
In a year, this will probably suck a lot less.
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You're fairly well informed, but not quite right. This is IHMC's own walking algorithm, not the Boston Dynamics stuff, as can be seen more clearly from e.g.
this video [youtube.com] [youtube.com]
You're right about the two months and about sucking less in a year though ;-)
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People may be talking about it but I won't be happening any time soon. People have also been talking for decades about a viable flying commuter vehicle. That has not happened yet either.There has yet to be a truly autonomous car. Even the Google car needs a vehicle to pre-map the course in high resolution so it can differentiate between stationary and movable objects and a human backup to take over when it can not deal with the situation.
2004/2005 DRC (Score:4, Insightful)
The first attempt at DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous car race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge) made it less than 12km before getting stuck - in 2004. Now only nine years later people are talking about the imminent arrival of driverless vehicles.
I've made that point before. I was at the 2004 DRC (and in the 2005 one). The 2004 DRC was pathetic. It was covered by the Comedy Channel. The Ohio State entry (a huge Oskosh truck) ran into a parked vehicle at slow speed and pushed it for a while until DARPA people finally sent it an emergency stop signal. The CMU approach was to have a semitrailer full of people at workstations doing detailed manual path planning. The CD with the route was released an hour or so before the start, so their people had a short period to plan the exact path, using recent high-res aerial photos. DARPA's competition chief, an active-duty USMC colonel, found out they were pre-planning, and so, the night before, a few of his troops went out and moved some obstacles. This was the result. CMU's vehicle plowed right through a highly visible sheet metal fence. [overbot.com] They were the most successful team. The others did much worse.
Then in 2005, there were 23 teams with working vehicles running around the California Motor Speedway, none running into anything. The second day of the 2005 Grand Challenge was the day the press suddenly recognized that automatic driving was real.
Answer to the obvious question (Score:2)