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40 years of Boston Dynamics
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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How much of these demos are prescripted?
All of them? It's a robot, it needs to be programmed to do a thing.
I think it's mostly to show off what it can do if you want/need it to do so.
I used to work across the street from their labs and we would regularly see them testing their robots in the parking lot. There were lots of areas of uneven ground that made for great testing. Eventually they reached out to us and a few other companies to offer tours of their facilities.
When we took them up on the offer one of the things I immediately noticed in one of their indoor testing areas was that everything was marked with what looked kind of like QR codes. The guy giving the tour said that the computing power in the robots was still fairly limited, and they needed as much of it as possible to focus on the actual robotics. So rather than have a ton of image/video processing they opted to label things that told the robot “this is a box”, “this is a door”, “this is a table” etc.
They could then send an instruction like “pick up the box, carry it through the door, and put it on the table”. The robot would then look for the appropriate QR codes and figure out how to complete the task.
That was 10+ years ago at this point. I don’t think they need those QR codes any more.
Thats actually cool to know thanks for expanding on this. The videos are shot to be very impressive but in reality i wonder how much use this would be in real world? Maybe some kind of warehouse stacking where you can qr label everything or if it cluld truly navite a semi-set route maybe some sort of inspection of remote facilities? Maybe building stuff on the moon? (Assuming you could deal with the dust somehow)
Tesla already has hundreds of humanoid robots in its factories doing simple stuff slowly. so does Amazon.
My understanding is that robots in warehouses like these are controlled by a central computer system that manages their movements, etc. It makes sense to have a central authority that manages all activity in an enclosed environment.
Whereas the Boston Dynamics ones are largely self contained. A number of years ago they developed a 4-legged “Pack bot” as a proof of concept. It was designed to carry hundreds of pounds of supplies and follow soldiers as they hiked through all sorts of terrain.
Yeah this sounds like an ideal application of NPUs. We live in interesting times