- Boston Dynamic Robot Atlas can do the somersaults now
- The most fluid dynamic movements of robots are possible thanks to Boston Dynamic’s robotic experience and Nvidia models
- Atlas looks much more like C-3po now and moves much more like a human
I understand it, Blue, the adorable collaboration of robots between Nvidia, Google and Disney, captivated hearts, but I have seen something better and more practical of Boston Dynamics based on many of the same fundamental models of Nvidia. In addition, it is a better indicator of the next great step, or cart of cart, in humanoid robotics.
Boston Dynamics was one of the first to adopt the Nvidia Groot project, and now has deepened the association taking advantage of multiple NVIDIA platforms, including the Jetson Thor computing platform and the Isaac Isaac Laboratory, which uses Isaac Sim technologies and Nvidia’s omiversion to help boost its impressive robot to Atlaside Atlaside All-Electric.
Jetson Thor is combined with the Atlas body and manipulation controllers to take advantage of multimodals, and the Isaac laboratory framework is used to help the robot learn in virtual environments.
All this helps with movement and adaptation to unforeseen or at least unexpected environments, which can also improve the safety of a humanoid robot that one day could work with you.
It would be difficult to conceptualize the benefits of all that deep technology if it were not for this video.
Attend
In the last demonstration of Atlas, the totally electric humanoid robot 6 feet high and the humanoid robot all electric are dragged, the races, the rolls, performs a can operator movement (ask their parents who sprouts) and cart wheels.
The series of movements was so shocking that I had to ask if the video had accelerated so that everything was softer. Boston Dynamics representatives confirmed that the video is running at a normal speed.
While watching the video and imagined all the virtual training necessary to achieve live movements, it occurred to me that we have reached a turning point.
Apart, C-3
Of course, the hydraulic Atlas could make parkour and setback, but it didn’t look much like us. Atlas Electric is a different story. His physiology is decidedly human. The head lacks a true face, but it is clearly a head, and the proportions of the body are normal if they are reinforced a bit to the size of the body builder. Remember, there are 330 pounds.
In other words, Atlas finally looks much more like C-3po. Now, there are many new Humanoid Robots from Tesla (Optimus), Figure AI (Figure 01), X1 (Neo Gama) and Unitree (Unitree G1).
With the exception of G1, these robots are mobile disappointments. None of them move in truly fluid and convincing ways. His steps are stopping, his movements stutter, sometimes there are significant pauses among the actions that humans generally extend like many bright pearls.
The majority, in fact, moves as C-3po. Be fair, what Star Wars Protocol Droid was actor Anthony Daniels with a rigid plastic suit, trying not to succumb to the heat of the African desert. Even so, the robot became an icon and the template for our almost five decades of dreams of humanoid robot. Perhaps that is why people are so excited about all those other robots, even if they should not be.
Atlas is different, and I think it is the combination of the Boston Dynamic decades in robotics engineering (the company’s robots competed in robotics challenges years before most of these other companies enter space) and the powerful silicon models and foundations of Nvidia that are making the difference.
It is not enough to build a robot that can move and perform basic tasks. Most other robots competitors know this and have associated with Google and OpenAi to get access to their multimodal AI models, but I think they are playing.
If humanoid robotic development were a horse race, I would put my money in Boston Dynamics and Nvidia. Together, they will probably bring us a factory legion and, eventually, the robots at home that all make literal somersaults around us and make us ask what we saw in C-3po first.
