It is unclear if Masayoshi Son, Chairman of Softbank, was one of the 17 million YouTube viewers of Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog before acquiring the company for an undisclosed amount this past Thursday. What is clear is the acquisition of Boston Dynamics by Softbank is a big deal. Softbank’s humanoid robot Pepper is trading up her dainty wheels for a pair of sturdy legs.

In expressing his excitement for the acquisition, Masayoshi Son said, “Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities. Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots. I am thrilled to welcome them to the SoftBank family and look forward to supporting them as they continue to advance the field of robotics and explore applications that can help make life easier, safer and more fulfilling.”

Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics, previously sold his company to Google in 2013. Following the departure of Andy Rubin from Google, the internet company expressed buyers remorse. Raibert’s company failed to advance from being a military contractor to a commercial enterprise. It became very challenging incorporating Boston Dynamic’s zoo of robots (mechanical dogs, cheetahs, bulls, mules and complex humanoids) into Google’s autonomous strategy. Since Rubin’s exit in 2014, rumors of buyers acquiring Boston Dynamics from Google have ranged from Toyota Research to Amazon Robotics. Softbank represents a new chapter for Raibert, and possible the entire industry.

Raibert’s statement to the press gave astute readers a peek of what to expect: “We at Boston Dynamics are excited to be part of SoftBank’s bold vision and its position creating the next technology revolution, and we share SoftBank’s belief that advances in technology should be for the benefit of humanity. We look forward to working with SoftBank in our mission to push the boundaries of what advanced robots can do and to create useful applications in a smarter and more connected world.” A quick study of the assets of both companies reveals how Boston Dynamics could help Softbank in its mission to build robots to benefit humanity.

Softbank’s premier robot is Pepper, a four-foot tall social robot that has been mostly deployed in Asia as a customer service agent. Recently, Pepper, as part of Softbank’s commitment to the Trump administration to invest $50 billion in the United States has been spotted in stores in California. As an example, Pepper proved itself as a valuable asset last year to Palo Alto’s premier tech retailer B8ta, accounting for a 6 times increase in sales. To date, there are close to 10,000 Pepper robots deployed worldwide, mostly in Asian retail stores. However, Softbank is also the owner of Sprint with 4,500 cell phone stores across the USA, and a major investor in WeWork with 140 locations globally servicing 100,000 members – could Pepper be the customer service agent or receptionist of the future?

According to Softbank’s website, Pepper is designed to be a “day-to-day companion,” with its most compelling feature being the ability to perceive emotions. Softbank boasts that their humanoid is the first robot ever to recognize moods of homo sapiens and adapt its behavior accordingly. While this is extremely relevant for selling techniques, Softbank is most proud of Pepper being the first robot to be adopted into homes in Japan. It is believed that Pepper is more than a point-of-purchase display gimmick, but an example of the next generation of caregivers for the rising elderly populations in Japan and the United States. According to the Daily Good, “Pepper could do wonders for the mental engagement and continual monitoring of those in need.” Its under $2,000 price point also provides an attractive incentive to introduce the robot into new environments, however wheel-based systems are a limitation in the home with clutter floors, stairs and other unforeseen obstacles.

Boston Dynamics is almost the complete opposite of Softbank; it is a research group spun out of MIT. Its expertise is not in social robots but in military “proofs of concepts” like futuristic combat mules. The company has touted some of the most frightening mechanical beasts to ever walk the planet from metal Cheetahs that sprint at over 25 miles per hour to mechanized dogs that scale mountains with ease to one of the largest humanoids every built that has an uncanny resemblance to Cyberdyne’s T-800. In a step towards commercialization, Boston Dynamics released earlier this year its newest monster – a wheel-biped leg robot named Handle that can easily lift over a hundred pounds and jump higher than Lebron James. Many analysts pontificated that this appeared to be Boston Dynamics attempt to prove its relevance to Google with a possible last mile delivery bot.

In an IEEE interview when Handle debuted last February, Raibert exclaimed, “Wheels are a great invention. But wheels work best on flat surfaces and legs can go anywhere. By combining wheels and legs, Handle can have the best of both worlds.” IEEE writer Evan Ackerman questioned, after seeing Handle, if the next generation of Boston Dynamic’s humanoids could feature legs with roller-skate like shoes. One is certain that Boston Dynamics is the undisputed leader of dynamic control and balance systems for complex mechanical designs.

Leading roboticist Dan Kara of ABI Research confirmed that “these [Boston Dynamics] are the world’s greatest experts on legged mobility.”

If walking is the expertise of Raibert’s team and Softbank is the leader of cognitive robotics with a seemingly endless supply of capital, the combination could be the first real striding humanoid capable of human-like emotions. By 2030 there will be 70 million people over the age of 65 years in America, with a considerable smaller amount of caregivers. To answer this call researchers are already converting current versions of Pepper into sophisticated robotic assistants. Last year, Rice University unveiled a “Multi-Purpose Eldercare Robot Assistant (MERA)” which is essentially a customized version of the Softbank’s robot. MERA is specifically designed to be a home companion for seniors that “records and analyzes videos of a person’s face and calculates vital signs such as heart and breathing rates.” Rice University partnered with IBM’s Aging-in-Place Research Lab to create MERA’s speech technology. IBM’s Lab founder, Susann Keohane, explained that Pepper “has everything bundled into one adorable self.” Now with Boston Dynamic’s legs Pepper could be a friend, physical therapist, and life coach walking side by side with its human companion.

Daniel Theobald, founder of Vecna Technologies – a healthcare robotic company, summed it best last week, “I think Softbank has made a major commitment to the future of robotics. They understand that the world economy is going to be driven by robotics more and more.”

Next Tuesday we will dive further into the implications of Softbank’s purchase of Boston Dynamics with Dr. Howard Morgan/First Round Capital, Tom Ryden/MassRobotics and Dr. Eric Daimler/Obama White House at RobotLabNYC’s event on 6/13 @ 6pm WeWork Grand Central (RSVP).

Spotmini by Boston Dynamics. Source: Boston Dynamics/YouTube

In a long-awaited transaction, The New York Times Dealbook announced that SoftBank was buying Boston Dynamics from Alphabet (Google). Also included in the deal is the Japanese startup Schaft. Acquisition details were not disclosed.

Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were acquired by Google when Andy Rubin was developing Google’s robot group through a series of acquisitions. Both companies have continued to develop innovative mobile robots. And both have been on Google’s for sale list.

Boston Dynamics, a DARPA and DoD-funded 25 year old company, designed two and four-legged robots for the military. Videos of BD’s robots WildCat, Big Dog, Cheetah, SpotMini (shown above getting into an elevator) and Handle, have been YouTube hits for years. Handle, BD’s most recent is a two-wheeled, four-legged hybrid robot that can stand, walk, hop, run and roll at up to 9 MPH.

Schaft, a Japanese startup/participant in the DARPA Robotic Challenge, recently unveiled a two-legged robot that climbed stairs, can carry 125 pounds of payload, move in tight spaces and keep its balance throughout.

SoftBank, through another acquisition (of French Aldabaran, the maker of the Nao and Romeo robots), and in a joint venture with Foxconn and Alibaba, has developed and marketed thousands of Pepper robots. Pepper is a cute, humanoid, mobile robot being marketed and used as a guide and sales assistant. The addition of Boston Dynamics and Schaft to the SoftBank stable add talent and technology to their growing robotics efforts, particularly the Tokyo-based Schaft.

Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities. Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the information revolution,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x8Bc0z3Ixw

Credit: Boston Dynamics

Handle is a research robot standing 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically. It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the other quadruped and biped robots Boston Dynamics’ build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

Watch below:

Two wonderful moments: tackling stairs like it’s no one’s business and the appropriate jumping freeze frame at the end.

Source: DRCihmcRobotics

A video posted to YouTube last week shows Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas balancing on one foot, while standing on a 2cm thick plywood edge.

The team writes: “This video was recorded during a lucky run, usually the robot is not able to maintain balance for this long. The shaking is caused by poor state estimation (we only use onboard sensors). The control algorithm is developed by IHMC the robot was built by Boston Dynamics.”

Pretty impressive!

Spotmini by Boston Dynamics. Source: Boston Dynamics/YouTube

SpotMini is a new smaller version of the Spot robot, weighing 55 lbs dripping wet (65 lbs if you include its arm.) SpotMini is all-electric (no hydraulics) and runs for about 90 minutes on a charge, depending on what it is doing. SpotMini is one of the quietest robots Boston Dynamics have ever built. It has a variety of sensors, including depth cameras, a solid state gyro (IMU) and proprioception sensors in the limbs. These sensors help with navigation and mobile manipulation. SpotMini performs some tasks autonomously but often uses a human for high-level guidance.

For more information about SpotMini visit their website.

The maker of advanced humanoid and 4-legged robots (BigDog and Atlas), Boston Dynamics, is up for sale. According to the Financial Times, “this is one of those discordant moments that makes you question easy assumptions… and the current state of Alphabet and of robots.”

Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of Andy Rubin’s 9-company shopping spree. At the time the company had 80 employees and many millions of dollars of research contracts from DARPA and the DoD. Although no financial information was provided at the time, various sources have estimated that Google paid $60 million plus extensive stock options. A more recent guesstimate from The Dallas Business Journal was $500 million.

Andy Rubin left the company in October 2014. After this the robot initiative was plagued by leadership changes, failed collaborations and an unsuccessful search for a new leader. Fomenting this lack of cohesion were Boston Dynamics executives who were reluctant to work with Google’s other robot engineers, according to a person familiar with the group.

The tensions spilled into recorded meetings and emails published on a Google worker forum. The documents were made available to Bloomberg News, which reported that Aaron Edsinger, director of robotics at Google in San Francisco, said he had been trying to create a low-cost electric quadruped robot with Boston Dynamics, but there was “a bit of a brick wall around the division.”

This recently released Boston Dynamics video of a humanoid robot trudging through the snow and being pushed over has been seen by almost 15 million viewers, but not enough to convince Google that it would generate real revenue. Consequently Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has decided to sell Boston Dynamics “as it is not likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years,” Bloomberg News reports, citing two people familiar with the plans. Possible buyers include Toyota’s research institute and Amazon, which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to the Bloomberg report.

Earlier this year The New York Times reported that “Google’s robotics division has been plagued by low morale and a lack of leadership since the unit’s founder left abruptly in 2014.”

Alphabet, the new holding company that separated Google from its collection of speculative projects, has reframed the robots effort, moving it from a stand-alone division inside Google to a piece of the X research division. The company has also hired Hans Peter Brondmo, a technology industry veteran who last worked at Nokia, to help with management. X is using some element of robotics in numerous projects like self-driving cars; Project Wing, an effort to deliver packages with drone aircraft; and Makani, an effort to capture wind energy with high-flying kites.

The Financial Times story also said:

This is also a moment for reality in robotics. The past two years have brought an unending stream of predictions about the coming “robo-calypse”. Just about the only thing left to discuss has been whether the robots will put us all out of work first, or whether a malignant AI will wipe us out.

As people working in the field are growing tired of explaining, the current state of the technology — though advancing fast — is a long way from these science fiction scare stories. The uncertain fate of Boston Dynamics underlines that truth. Even Google didn’t have the patience to wait for a walking robot to step out of the lab and earn itself a living.

Boston Dynamics just released a video of a new four legged robot named “Spot”.  It is an evolution along the lines of their previous four-legged robots like BigDog and Wildcat, but this one is much smaller and lighter (160lbs / 72.5kg). As usual not many details are known, but Spot is electrically powered (others had an internal combustion engine onboard) and has a prominent rotating LIDAR on top.

Spot can perform the usual Boston Dynamics trick: it can withstand a kick without tipping over in an eerie life-like manner; and it can also move slowly and accurately indoors while being able to run faster if necessary.

You can watch the video below and you can read other Boston Dynamics articles here.

ATLAS climbs a ladder in December’s DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

Teams of roboticists from around the globe will convene in Los Angeles for the third and final round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge on June 5^th  and 6^th, 2015. For this phase, DARPA will be cutting the safety tethers, power cords, and network connections that previously assisted robots. The roster of participants has also changed, with Japan, Korea, and the EU electing to sponsor teams and Team SCHAFT, winners of the last phase, deciding to withdraw from the competition. DRC Program manager Gill Pratt explained that by raising the stakes and expanding participation, DARPA is hoping to foster the development of more advanced autonomous behavior for robots that operate in complex environments.

Pratt started the announcement by explaining how the Challenge has already exceeded his expectations. At the DRC Trials held last December (check out our beginner’s guide if this is news to you), organizers expected the winning team could maybe score about 15 points, but four teams exceeded that number and SCHAFT won 27. Now that participants have shown what they’re capable of, DARPA wants to push them further.

He explained that robot hardware was, across the board, robust, and teams did surprisingly well with grasping and dexterity, mobility, and human-robot interface design. But it’s time to solve, in Pratt’s words, “the really hard part of the robotics problem.” He wants humans and robots to be able to collaborate more effectively in the field by leveraging the unique capabilities of both. To see this happen, he’s changing the rules to force teams to rely less upon the remote control of individual joints and motions and instead implement task-based interfaces that incorporate advanced perception, minimal human guidance, and complex autonomous behavior.

The trial will still involve two attempts at eight tasks. But there’s a twist: robots will now only have an hour to perform all eight consecutively. In the last round, robots attempted each stage separately and were allotted 30 minutes for each task. The tasks have yet to be finalized, but details will be sparse until the teams converge in California for the competition. Seven tasks will be derived from the challenges of the last round, but one surprise task will be introduced at the competition. Pratt pointed out that robots will be “at least four times faster than the trials, and perhaps even faster.”

“We think the robot being able to survive a fall is difficult but not too hard. We have little information on the difficulty of getting up. This is a very new thing we’re trying, very high risk, for those machines that do fall down, it’s going to be really neat to see how they handle it, because […] humans will not be able to teleoperate the machine with any reasonable performance.”

At the DRC trials last December, the robots often moved excruciatingly slow and depended upon the careful control of remote human operators. Even with this divine guidance, they still fell down on their safety tethers quite often. But these handicaps will be gone in the next round. DARPA organizers want to see how well a robot can perform in the field without an umbilical cord, so they’re cutting the robots’ physical and electrical tethers. They’ve also decided that robots will entirely lose their network connection “for a substantial fraction of the time available” explaining this had the goal of preventing direct teleoperation.

In the December trials, robots were connected to tethers that kept them from crashing with the ground. In the next round, robots will lose their leases, fall down, and — hopefully — pick themselves back up. Source: Team IHMC

Pratt explained that these requirements were added to more accurately simulate the challenges faced by disaster robots at Fukushima-Daiichi. Robots depended upon limited battery power and thick concrete and steel-reinforced walls in the plant made network connectivity intermittent at best. And there certainly weren’t any safety lines to prevent the robots from falling.

Whenever the robots have a network connection, they’ll have significantly more computing resources than were available in the last round. Organizers are curious about the new paradigm of cloud-assisted autonomy and want to see how it could be used in field robots. So robots will have access to “as much computing power, as much disk space, as much crowd-sourced expertise” as the teams desire. Robots will also be able to connect to the internet. Look for DRC robots to ask for your assistance via Facebook next summer!

In the DRC’s final round, robots will have more resources available via their network connection, but the connection will only be intermittently available. Source: DARPA

Pratt also announced that the governments of Japan, Korea, and The EU are planning to sponsor teams. In light of this funding infusion, and the surprising performance of unfunded teams in the last round, DARPA has invited more teams to join this final round of the competition. Any team that can demonstrate a robot completing several “simple” DRC tasks is invited to submit a video to the DRC website by February 2^nd, 2015. Eleven teams are qualified at this moment but organizers are hoping 24 teams will participate next June.

Another important announcement today was the news that Team SCHAFT – winner of the December trials – has withdrawn from the competition to focus on commercializing its technology. Remember that Google acquired SCHAFT last December.

SCHAFT, who won the last round by 7 points, won’t be competing in LA next June. Instead, SCHAFT’s technology might soon appear in a Google robot. Source: DARPA

Considering executives’ assertions that Google had no plans to become a military contractor and the rumor that started circulating in January, SCHAFT’s disaffiliation from DARPA isn’t too surprising. As announced in March, the funding to which SCHAFT was entitled will be distributed among two previously-unfunded teams, THOR and ViGIR.

“[DARPA hopes] companies will pick up the technology developed in the DRC, develop it further, commercialize it, and the results will be cheap enough to make reasonably-priced disaster robots.”

By making the challenge so demanding and offering a $2 million prize, DARPA is hoping to lay the technological foundation for more autonomous and capable robots in the commercial market. In fact, DARPA will measure the success of the competition in part by the commercial investments in robotics that it inspires. To help DRC technology reach the market, DARPA and some participating teams plan to publish the lessons they learned in the challenge in academic journals.

Left: Team Stanford’s Stanley, the winning car of DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge.
Right: The Google Car, developed by a team led by Sebastian Thrun, former leader of Team Stanford. Sources: DARPA, Google

It’s reasonable to expect success — by hosting the Grand Challenge in 2003, DARPA turned the key on autonomous vehicles. Google acquired the winning team from Stanford, so you can trace their autonomous car’s lineage back to DARPA. With SCHAFT’s announcement and Google’s acquisitions of it and Boston Dynamics, history is repeating itself. Dr. Pratt’s vision of the DRC’s legacy seems to be materializing before the competition even finishes.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• Robots Podcast: The DARPA Robotics Challenge
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• Robots, soldiers and cyborgs: The future of warfare
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.
For more DRC reading, see our interview with Dr. Pratt.

When Google bought Boston Dynamics last December, the news made headlines, but it was not the first time the Internet giant has invested in DARPA-funded robotics. As part of Robohub’s Big Deals series, we asked Gill Pratt, Program Manager of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, to shed some light on what DARPA thinks about Google’s robotics acquisitions , and what it might mean to the robotics and open source communities.

Congratulations, Gill, on the DARPA Robotics Trials – what was your personal assessment of the event?

I was very pleased with how well the teams performed, and in particular that the hardware for the majority of the teams worked so reliably. In general, the teams did slightly better than we had expected and this was probably the result of a lot of very careful preparation. The infrastructure that we set up also worked reliably in the trials. Still, the DRC Trials were really just a beginning and showed us the potential of what can be done in disaster scenarios with robots.

Cloud computing was an important facet of the DARPA Robotics Challenge and especially the Virtual Robotics Challenge … How do you see cloud computing helping the development of robots?

The importance of cloud computing for Robotics falls into two different categories. The first has to do with simulation environments. We used cloud computing for the first time with the Virtual Robotics Challenge, which we had back in June as a precursor to the DRC Trials, to do real-time simulation of tasks in unstructured environments. We rented a whole lot of cloud computing space, we ran a very good simulator developed for DARPA by the Open Source Robotics Foundation, and we adjusted the latency – the time delay – so that it would be the same for all the teams, even though they were located in different parts of the world. It was a tremendous enabler to run a real-time competition based on simulation that also involves human-robot collaboration. Doing so required that the simulation run in real-time. That was a big first and we felt it was very successful.

Another important aspect of cloud computing is something that we have not used to date, but I think has a lot of potential for the future: the ability to have a robot’s computing and data hosted remotely. There’s a lot of potential for this, in particular for doing perception. Forty percent of the human brain is used for perception, and perception is one of the most difficult tasks for an autonomous robot. It’s very difficult to fit a computer with the size, weight, and power that you need to achieve really good perception onto a robot: the computer just gets too large, it consumes too much power, and it weighs too much. However, if you have access to cloud resources with lots of data and lots of computing cycles, they can help move that burden off of the physical robot.

Perhaps most exciting for the future of cloud computing in robotics is that when one robot learns how to perceive something, or learns how to do a particular task, that learning can be instantly shared with other robots. This sharing could have a catalytic effect on the capabilities of robots, particularly in structured environments.

This is really an up and coming field. How likely are we to see commercial interest come out of cloud computing for robotics?

If you look at the research being done we see a lot of possibilities with cloud computing for robots. In the commercial world, I think we are going to see it applied first to structured environments where there are lots of human artifacts — things like doors, stairs, furniture, tools — and where a large database of stored examples of these artifacts can help the recognition problem.

The Atlas robot, created by Bostron Dynamics and DARPA, was used by several teams in the DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

This is an interview for our Big Deals series, so we’re wondering, what does DARPA think about Google buying up some of the technologies that DARPA has spent years building? We’re thinking of the cars, the humanoids …

We are thrilled to see commercial interest. It’s one of the signs of success for the investments that we have made in future technology.

We think that it takes commercial investment to drive down the cost of technology. A very well known example is the cellphone. Cellphones have microprocessors in them that many years ago began with investments by DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office and others. Cell phones have inertial measurement units to figure out the tilt of the cellphone. They have displays; they have GPS receivers; they have radio devices that work at low power. I can point to any number of DARPA investments that helped start those technologies, and of course cellphones now talk to the Internet, which is probably the best known output of all of DARPA’s investments. But if the Department of Defense wanted to produce a cellphone without the commercial world having picked it up and turned it into a product that billions of people use, it would cost many orders of magnitude more than it does now. It’s really because of the commercial world that we’ve seen the price of cellphones go down.

But DARPA is not only interested in seeding technologies with these early investments; we are also committed to solving real problems for national security. In fact, we have a variety of programs that use cellphones. One of these is called TransApps, where soldiers use smart phones to plan and carry out missions and layer and share data between teams. This is an example where investment by the commercial world made possible a national security capability that otherwise might not be feasible because of excessive cost.

By analogy, what’s going on in robotics is that we’ve seen some interest in the commercial world in taking this to the next step. And they have resources far beyond what DARPA has to further develop a technology and, most importantly, to drive down cost.

So these big deals are a good thing for DARPA?

Yes, they are a wonderful thing for DARPA and, more broadly, for our nation.

Do you think it’s a good thing for the field of robotics in general?

Absolutely, but I understand why there’s some anxiety.  It’s true that, for a very short time, some talented people in the field will be working for a commercial firm rather than for DARPA. However, that effect is transient and very small compared to the much more important thing, which is that these corporate investments both accelerate the field and show that it is going to be real.

This anxiety is a lot like the kind you get when your kids leave home. It’s sad, and for a while you’re going to miss them, but wait a while and then the grandkids come. The important thing is for Robotics to become a field that is not only about prototypes or lab demonstrations, but a field where significant resources are invested to make products that really improve people’s lives. We saw it with the Roomba vacuum cleaner, but we want to go beyond that. These kinds of commercial investments will make the field far more attractive to startups and to students who are planning their careers. The net effect is strongly positive.

How do you think this corporate interest in robotics will impact the open source community?

Open source is very important. It allows us to develop pre-competitive catalysts to help the whole field move forward.

In the integrated circuits world it was recognized that you couldn’t build experimental integrated circuits as easily as you could wire up a circuit with discrete components like capacitors and resistors and transistors that you solder by hand. As a result, people working in the area at that time needed to develop a simulator to allow for the experimentation of how a chip would work without actually having to make the chip. The idea was to do the design and the debug cycle on the computer in simulation instead of having to do it on the bench: when you were done you could press a button and have confidence that the chip would actually work. The open-source simulator SPICE filled that niche.

The very same kind of thing is true in the robotics field. The key is to recognize that simulation is really a pre-competitive technology now.  We don’t need to have proprietary closed simulation systems and keep reinventing the simulator over and over again. We’ve done it enough times now to know that it would be useful to apply open source. In the same way, I think that an operating system is precompetitive – it has been done enough times that a new company should not try to distinguish itself based on a proprietary version of an OS.

Rather, let’s just move on to the next thing where the real innovation is going to occur. DARPA funded the Open Source Robotics Foundation to develop an open source simulator for the DARPA Robotics Challenge because we think that it will catalyze the whole field to everyone’s advantage.

With the purchase of Boston Dynamics, some headlines were saying that Google bought military robotics. Is this an accurate assessment?

I think it’s very inaccurate. It’s based on the confusion – and the conflation – of two aspects of robotics: remote bodies and remote brains. A robot allows you to have a mechanical body take the place of a human being; for example, a robot can work in a dangerous environment while a human supervisor is in a safe place. And a robot also allows you to perform some of the function of the human brain autonomously in a remote location. When you conflate bodies and brains, and say that there is only one idea here, it’s like saying, “The robot looks like person, so it must be as intelligent as a person, and therefore I should be scared of all robots, particularly those funded by the Department of Defense.”

All of the robots that I’m aware of, except for the ones that actually have weapons or specialized sensors on them, are generic. They are neither military nor commercial. They are just robots that have mobility and perhaps some manipulation, but there are not classed to one type or the other. And they are all almost completely empty-headed: their bodies may look like ours, but their heads are almost totally empty.

In terms of autonomy, the technology has such a long way to go that the fears that have been generated are way out of proportion to the state of the art. At the DRC Trials, for example, we had people supervising the robots in pretty tight loops, telling them what to do. While autonomy may be able to handle very simple environments, close human supervision is going to be needed in unstructured environments for some time.

What do you say to people who are uncomfortable with the use of military robots in a commercial context?

I think there are legitimate concerns, but from a rational point of view it’s important to distinguish between a weapon, which none of the robots we are talking about are, and a machine that makes us feel scared because it looks like us but it’s hard to understand exactly how it works. Of course, science fiction has stoked that fear with movies like Terminator and so forth, but that reaction actually goes back a long, long way to stories like Frankenstein – anything that sort of looks like a person but is hard to understand will generate fear. It’s an emotional reaction. However, from a rational perspective, if you consider how little autonomy these real machines actually have, you realize that the worry is way out of proportion to reality.

What are some of the benefits that could come out of combining Google’s expertise in data with hardware from Boston Dynamics?

I don’t know the specific applications that Google is thinking of – it’s their prerogative to discuss them or not, and they haven’t told DARPA.

Generally speaking, when you think about data and robotics, there are a lot of exciting things that could happen. For example, you could do perception better by using a lot of data and sophisticated search. This is not necessarily the kind of search we think of when we type words into our browsers, but the kind that involves images, where a robot could say, “Okay, I see something and because of many prior examples I know what to do,” and share that data in a useful way.

Would voice commands play into this dynamic, in addition to visual search? Would it make it easier for humans to interface with robots?

I’m not an expert on voice, so I don’t want to speculate, but I know that you can train better when you have a lot of data. Voice and natural language recognition have the potential to help with planning and perception, and I think they could also facilitate more intuitive interfaces for sharing information between robots and humans.

Team SCHAFT raises the arms of its S-One robot in victory after successfully completing the Climb Industrial Ladder task at the DRC Trials. SCHAFT won that task and three others, and scored the most points of any team at the event. Source: DARPA.

What new robotic technologies will DARPA be pushing that might appeal to big companies that are not traditionally robotics focused?

We’re really interested in cooperation directly between robots and between human beings and machines. We are also interested in dealing with dynamic environments. What I would like to do for the future of the DRC, and what I think that DARPA is going to push even beyond that, is to answer questions like “What if the communication is intermittent?” and “What if the environment is beyond a set of familiar things that I’ve seen before?” … What do we do if we’re actually outdoors? How do we handle this piece of vegetation that’s in front of us? Do we go through it or around it? If we go through it, do we move the branches out of the way?

We also still have a lot of research to do to figure out how to apply cloud computing when the environment is unstructured, like it would be in disasters or outdoor scenarios.  And if the communications are intermittent, we have to figure out how to cache enough of the intelligence on the robot itself so that it can continue to do what it needs to even when it’s disconnected from the cloud. Of course, disconnected operation may be at a reduced level of effectiveness, but we don’t want the robot to stop altogether when communications go down for a little while. We want the robot to have at least some ability to complete the tasks it was given to do.

How do you actually put behavior in the cloud? How do you take a data driven approach to behavior? I think that’s very much an unknown thing right now. Data driven approaches to perception are easier to understand, but we are going to try to take the next step and look at behavior as well.

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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

If the world outside the robotics community didn’t know about Boston Dynamics, Kiva and Nest, they do now. Recent robotics acquisitions and investments by major-league players like Google, Apple and Amazon have generated a blitz of headlines in the robotics world and beyond. Are we witnessing a power play in the making? What does it mean for the future of robotics? And is all the hype beneficial or harmful to the robotics community?

This month’s Robotics by Invitation will serve as a launch for Robohub’s newest focus series on how big time corporate attention effects the culture of robotics. In the coming weeks we will be bringing you insight from the likes of Steve Cousins, Dan Kara, Valery Komissarova, Avner Levin, Chad Partridge, Gill Pratt, Erin Rapacki, Frank Tobe, and Rob Wilson.

Today, RBI panelists Mark Stephen Meadows, AJung Moon and Alan Winfield weigh in …

Alan Winfield on “What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics?”

Judging by the levels of media coverage and frenzied speculation that has followed each acquisition, the short answer to what does it mean is: endless press exposure. I almost wrote ‘priceless exposure’ but then these are companies with very deep pockets; nevertheless the advertising value equivalent must be very high indeed. The coverage really illustrates the fact that these companies have achieved celebrity status …

Read more →

Mark Stephen Meadows on “What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics?”

Google, is the wild card for me.  With more acquisitions than Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft combined, the GOOG looks to be rigging up a kit that would offer excellent image recognition + navigation + mobility.   A robot that can roam around your home or maybe your city, and offer a helpful service. My bet is that these Googlebots (perhaps they will be cars) will have sharp eyes, simple yet helpful demeanors, and we’ll trade that robotic service for our personal info …

Read more →

AJung Moon on “What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics?”

It’s exciting for the robotics community that the giants (Google, Apple, and Amazon) are actively investing in robotics. Large scale investments by giant corporations, regardless of what their actual plans are, can have a positive impact on the job market for roboticists, increase competition between the giants and push robotics forward. But I began to feel uneasy when Google acquired Boston Dynamics …

Read more →

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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

It’s exciting for the robotics community that the giants (Google, Apple, and Amazon) are actively investing in robotics.

Indeed, my initial response to hearing about Google’s first seven of a series of acquisitions of robotics-related companies was a very positive one (these companies include Shaft, Industrial Perception, Meka Robotics, Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss, and Holomni, see Frank Tobe’s article for more details on these companies). Technologies from these companies are ones that can make robots mobile, perceptive, responsive, and interactive. The fact that the companies are now housed under one giant roof of Google made me imagine a future of next generation robots where Google-branded humanoids will be the next Baxter, working shoulder-to-shoulder with people in dynamic manufacturing environments, or assisting caregivers and serving seniors at care facilities. How could it not be exciting?

Even if Google’s actual direction is to put bipedal robots in self-driving cars so that people can enjoy fast, fully-autonomous door-to-door delivery of flowers on Valentine’s Day, my view was that such investments can only be good for the robotics community. Large scale investments by giant corporations, regardless of what their actual plans are, can have a positive impact on the job market for roboticists, increase competition between the giants and push robotics forward.

Then I began to feel a little bit uneasy when Google acquired Boston Dynamics. That’s because Boston Dynamics is not only a company with one of the most impressive control systems I’ve ever seen (I’m sure many of you will agree with this from the video of Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog, which has over 15 million views on YouTube), but it’s also a company that is known to have developed such impressive systems for the Pentagon, of all clients.

What does this all mean? What is Google planning to do with robots that can keep itself upright after being kicked, walk through rough terrains, run as fast as 29 miles per hour? The combination of Google-acquired companies became even more mysterious when the London-based AI company, DeepMind, was added to the mix. It’s safe to say that the uncertainty over Google’s plans with these companies has stirred up quite a bit of concern to the general public: some media coverage on the topic have been hyping the idea of Google building Skynet or being in the business of building robot soldiers.

Unless Google is indeed headed in those directions, I don’t believe that the public concern about the possibility of human extinction by Google-made robots in the near future is a good thing, either for the company or for the field of robotics in general. I think that public concerns over Google’s investment directions exist today because we, as a society, lack the presence of governing bodies whose role is to ensure that robotics technologies are developed and used for purposes desirable for the society, in manners aligned with society’s values.

However, I do applaud the fact that Google is setting up an ethics board to presumably oversee what they will and will not do with their technologies. If Google takes ethics seriously, I think Google could be a game changer in robotics (although it already is), not just by producing and selling cool robots in the future, but more importantly, by leading the way of tightly coupling ethics in robotics and making robots that “don’t do evil”.

Read more answers →

There is serious momentum in robotics these days, evidenced by recent news from Apple, Amazon and Google:

• Apple announced that they were investing $10.5 billion in supply chain robots and automation equipment and recently confirmed their acquisition of PrimeSense for $350 million (PrimeSense is the developer of the Kinnect 3D system used by MS Xbox)..
• Amazon, in a CBS 60 Minutes piece aired last Sunday, displayed a new concept delivery system using an octocopter. Remember that in 2012 Amazon spent $750 million to acquire Kiva Systems, the robot technology enabling robotically-delivered goods to a picker/packer.
• And now Google has set up a robotics division headed by the man behind the Android operating system, Andy Rubin. In Rubin’s first six months he has acquired seven robotic companies to jump start his new operation.
• UPDATE 12-14-13: Google confirms its eighth acquisition: Boston Dynamics. The new acquisition is an engineering company that specializes in building dynamic robots and software for human simulation. The acquisition adds 80+ technicians, engineers and scientists to the new Google Robots Division talent pool – plus a new location.

What does it all mean?

First, some details.

• From a NY Times article by John Markoff interviewing Google’s Andy Rubin:
  • Google acquired 7 tech companies in the last 6 months. Schaft, a Japanese start-up developing a humanoid robot; Industrial Perception, a Silicon Valley start-up that developed a computer vision system for loading and unloading trucks; Meka Robotics, a robot developer for academia; Redwood Robotics, a start-up intended to compete with the Baxter robot (and others) entering the small and medium-sized shop and factory marketplace; Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems used for special effects such as in the movie “Gravity;” Autofuss, a design and marketing firm and a partner in Bot & Dolly; and Holomni, a maker of powered caster modules for omnidirectional vehicles.
  • Although Google won’t disclose their plans, the article suggests that the company’s initial market will be in manufacturing, e.g., electronics assembly, which is mostly done by hand. “Manufacturing and logistics markets not being served by today’s robotic technologies are clear opportunity markets,” said Rubin.
  • The article suggests that the new Google robots will be able to automate any or all of the processes from the supply chain to the distribution channels to the consumer’s front door thereby creating a massive opportunity.
  • Google is already experimenting with urban deliveries including making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and others.
  • According to Markoff, “Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.”
• From The SFGate Tech Chronicles by James Temple:
  • Google is transforming itself in many ways including its new robotics division. Its constantly transforming its search engine into a sophisticated learning machine using artificial intelligence tools. Some of that AI talent is moving over to the new Robotics Division.
  • It’s been hiring super brains such as Ray Kurzweil and Peter Norvig and inhouse star Andy Rubin to head groups and divisions moving toward product development and even hardware manufacturing (remember that Google owns Motorola – a ready-made client for assembly and materials handling robots).
  • “Google’s move into robotics is likely to draw renewed attention and money into the space,” said Brian Gerkey in the article. “It’s a pretty exciting day for robotics when someone like Google makes an investment like that in robots, others are likely to follow suit. It can only spur investment and innovation.”
• From Bloomberg News by Adam Satariano:
  • Apple is investing $10.5 billion in new technologies and robotics to polish the new iPhone 5C’s colored plastic cover, to laser and CNC machines to carve the MacBook’s aluminum body, and for testing and inspection gear for iPhone and iPad lenses.
  • Apple invested $6.5 billion on similar robotics and factory automation equipment in their previous fiscal year.
  • Samsung has indicated it plans to spend $22 billion in capital expenditures this year but didn’t disclose any further details.
• For a review of the CBS 60 Minutes interview of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Charlie Rose, see my previous post, “Jeff Bezos Reaches for Tip of UAS Iceberg.”
• UPDATE 12-14-13: From a NY Times article by John Markoff about the Boston Dynamics acquisition:
• Markoff says: “The deal is also the clearest indication yet that Google is intent on building a new class of autonomous systems that might do anything from warehouse work to package delivery and even elder care.”
• Boston Dynamics, a 1992 spin-off from MIT, has been a great resource for youTube videos of wild robots. Their Big Dog video has been watched by more than 15 million viewers; their ATLAS robot video, the base robot given to the DARPA Robotics Challenge teams – a challenge to speed development of robotics technology for disaster response – has already passed the 2.5 million mark.
• This is not an insignificant acquisiton. An ongoing business employing 80+ highly paid engineers and scientists has to have cost Google a very high amount, perhaps in the low 9 figures.
• Boston Dynamic’s CEO and founder Marc Raibert was quoted in the article: “I am excited by Andy and Google’s ability to think very, very big, with the resources to make it happen.”

What does all this mean?

I think the yellow highlighted quote from Brian Gerkey sums up all these investments nicely: it’s a pretty exciting day for robotics when Google, Apple and Amazon ALL invest in robots and robotics. Others are likely to follow spurring further investment and innovation. Up until now, the big four of industrial robotics (KUKA, Fanuc, ABB and Yaskawa Motoman) were all foreign firms while two smaller American firms (iRobot and Intuitive Surgical) led the emerging service new-tech robotics sector. The remainder of this decade will be filled with amazing new robotics products from a variety of new providers — including Apple, Amazon and Google.

]]> https://robohub.org/darpas-virtual-robotics-challenge-a-practical-step-forward-on-the-long-road-toward-disaster-response-capable-humanoids/ Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:47:16 +0000 http://robohub.org/?p=15854  

Based on a media rountable discussion with DRC Program Manager Gill Pratt and CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation Brian Gerkey.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster was a wake-up call to the robotics community. In Japan, many asked why a country known for its cutting-edge robotics sector was unable to respond to the emergency. Worldwide, robotics experts pointed to the event as a real-world test of what robots can and cannot do.

Whether man-made or natural — or like Fukushima, a combination of the two — major catastrophic events, while rare, are becoming increasingly costly as human populations worldwide move to urban areas. This is why, in an effort to spur the development of agile humanoid first-responders, the US Department of Defense’s strategic plan identifies disaster response as a priority area, and why it is funnelling tens of millions of dollars into the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

DRC Program Manager Dr. Gill Pratt envisions a future where tele-operated robots can be quickly deployed by disaster-response personnel with minimal robotics training: “In Fukushima, during the first 24 hours, the explosions would not have occurred if it would have been possible to vent the reactors,” said Pratt in a media round-table last month. “Human beings tried to do this but had to turn around [because of the radiation]. Our hope is to develop machines that can actually intervene and help make a disaster [like this one] less severe.” Estimates of the total economic loss due to the Fukushima disaster range from $250B – $500B US.


Concept drawing for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Why a humanoid?
Though having a robot that can safely navigate dangerous places like the inside of a nuclear plant is no-doubt useful, one has to question whether the extreme cost and design challenge of developing a humanoid that is capable of doing so is worth the effort. Yet as Pratt points out, a disaster scenario that is catastrophic to humans is also most likely to occur in an environment that has been engineered for humans, and what kind of robot would be more capable of navigating in a human environment and using the tools found there than a humanoid?

As DARPA project leaders were designing parameters for the Robotics Challenge, they consulted with first-response experts — including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and identified key capability requirements that indeed seem to point to a humanoid solution: the ability to go through doors, climb steep stairs, walk on rough terrain, and the ability to use whatever tools are oh hand, such as a utility vehicle or a screw driver.

“Our belief is that we will never know where the next disaster is going to hit and when it will be, and so we have to be prepared to use whatever tools are on hand,” said Pratt. “And at least for the foreseeable future, those are tools for people to use, and so we need to adapt our machines to use those tools as quickly as possible.”

How does one gauge success when the potential payoff may be decades or more away?

Designing a roadmap for success
DARPA does not define the success of its programs through a profit and loss model, and its goal with the DARPA Robotics Challenge is not to bring a humanoid first-responder to every fire station in the country. As a government agency, DARPA focuses on bringing high-risk technologies to the point of prototype, and then handing these off to the military or commercial sector for development. It invests in challenges such as the DRC in order to spur radical innovation, and short-term technical failure is OK as long as the long-term potential payoff is high.

But despite these lofty goals, the question remains: what’s the roadmap for designing and overseeing a major robotics challenge such as this one? How does one gauge success when the potential payoff may be decades or more away?

DARPA’s previous autonomous car challenges offer some lessons, and one of them is that there isn’t always a winner.  Pratt admits that success for the DRC isn’t guaranteed, but says that the goal of the competition isn’t so much to declare a winner as it is to continually nudge the competitors towards greater achievements, while at the same time being realistic about what is actually doable. As a result, DARPA will be reevaluating the project’s milestones and adjusting the difficulty of the tasks in consultation with the participants along the way.

Previous autonomous car competitions are different from the current challenge in one major aspect, however: the older competitions were based on automotive technology, which already had a significant infrastructure in place. The robotics industry, by comparison, is still in its infancy, and so a great many hurdles exist for competitors, both at the software level and at the hardware level, and in terms of integration. Pratt has thus broken the competition down into three stages and four separate competitor tracks in an attempt to structure what is otherwise an extremely open-ended problem. (You can find a good explanation of how the competition breaks down on DARPA Robotics Challenge Fact Sheet.)

The first stage of the DRC — the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) — offers particular insight into DARPA’s strategy for success. The VRC, for which the results were announced earlier this month, was a cloud-based competition designed to test software, and its goal was to evaluate the teams’ robot perception, manipulation and locomotion in a virtual environment as a first step before moving on to the physical trials, which will take place in December of 2013. The big idea here is that teams will be able to try out their strategies in simulation first, before investing in hardware. “The reason we had this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams whose strength is primarily software,” said Pratt.

DARPA’s simulator models real-world physics and behaviours with incredibly high accuracy. Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSFR), the organization behind the VRC simulator, says that their goal is for the simulation to be the best possible stand-in for the real robot, so that teams that have done well in the VRC should be able to run their software virtually unchanged on the physical robot during the trials. And yet run to such a complex simulation — and to play that simulation back at interactive rates — takes a huge amount of computer power.

Success for the DRC isn’t guaranteed, but the goal of the competition isn’t so much to declare a winner as it is to continually nudge the competitors towards greater achievements.

“One of the key developments over the past several years has been the advancement of cloud computing resources,” explained Gerkey. “It’s now possible to rent access to cloud computing resources so that you can have modest computer at your end and have the simulation run somewhere else. That’s a key aspect of this project and it’s really required in order to run the competition.”

The seven winning teams from the VRC challenge each received an Atlas furnished by Boston Dynamics for use in the DRC trials, where they will compete with other funded and unfunded teams that have been developing their own hardware (see DARPA’s Meet the Teams video to get a sense of what Atlas will be up against). They now have until late December to transfer their software algorithms to the Atlas hardware shell, and practice running a real machine in real environment. The physical trials should be a good demonstrator of the success of the simulator approach to competition design.

Building a legacy
DARPA takes a long view to technology development, starting with identifying a major national security need (in this case: disaster response), then determining the specific technologies and innovations needed to address that need (in this case: easily deployed agile humanoid robots), and finally working to support the fundamental breakthroughs required to make these technologies possible. DARPA’s disaster challenge is thus about creating infrastructure to support long-term software and hardware development in the robotics community; it’s also about attracting bright minds to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

One of the legacies of the VRC is that all the software code for the simulator is being distributed open source, and so, as Gerkey points out, there is no cost to reuse it later.

“The history of software development has shown that this is the best possible, most efficient development model for building the common platform that a whole community comes to rely upon,” says Gerkey. “The simulation work that we’re doing is really part of a broader effort to build a common ecosystem of software tools and libraries that everyone can use. There are computers that are powerful enough to run this simulation that you can rent for on the order of a couple of dollars an hour.”

The hope is that, ultimately, the open-source VRC simulator will help speed up the development of robots in general by lowering the barrier of entry and that this, in turn, will lead to more capable robots – perhaps ones capable enough to be of service in a Fukushima-like disaster. Says Gerkey: “Once we can run this very realistic simulation in a competition, we can then try this in a classroom scenario. You don’t have to outfit your classroom with expensive powerful computers.”

Pratt agrees: “Right now we have a few really talented designers and a few companies that are beginning to be strong in the robotics field. We would like to see those numbers go way up, and we believe that the way to do it is to give people a tool to develop these machines without having to incur the cost of first building them.”

What are the economics, and how much are we willing to invest in preparing ourselves for rare but very costly events? That’s a national debate and decision that we need to make … It’s going to depend on that discussion much more than the technology — our role is to bring that technology to the point where that discussion is possible to have.– Gill Pratt, DARPA

Fostering international cooperation
Fukushima is used as an example to motivate the need for robotic platforms in dangerous environments, and the VRC is being promoted as an internationally beneficial endeavour, so I asked Pratt what specifically is being done to foster international cooperation, and whether there was a possibility that DARPA would work with other countries on future challenges.

Pratt answered that a key measure for success in this project is engagement with the international community. “All the code that we’re writing is distributed under the Apache 2 licence which is a very permissive open source license that allows anyone in the world to do anything that they want with this software. We would love for the challenge (once we are done with it in the next year and a half) to move around the world, and we have been in discussions with our counterparts in Japan and the EU about the possibility of this becoming a rotating contest. We think that [making societies more resilient to disasters] is a need that the whole world has, and so and I’m spending quite a lot of my time having lots of discussions about what the future of this is going to be once we are done … I personally think that the international part of this is a key way to measure how well we have done, so if we’re successful in having the DRC continue on somewhere else in the world, then it will be clear that we have done well.”

Though Pratt hesitates to predict how long it will be before we have robots capable of helping out in situations such as the one in Fukushima, he is convinced that DARPA’s Robotic Challenge will result in some major developments for the field:

“I think that at the end of the DRC in December 2014, we’re going to see a demonstration that will be very evocative, and that will make clear that robots could eventually have these kinds of capabilities. The only question then is, what are the economics, and how much are we willing to invest in preparing ourselves for rare but very costly events? That’s a national debate and decision that we need to make … It’s going to depend on that discussion much more than the technology — our role is to bring that technology to the point where that discussion is possible to have.”

***

More info:

DARPA Robotics Challenge Website
DARPA Robotics Challenge Fact Sheet

Look out for DRC trial coverage in December!

]]> https://robohub.org/video-of-boston-dynamics-petman-in-action/ Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:41:04 +0000 http://robohub.org/?p=11792 Boston Dynamics just released a new video of their robot PETMAN. The robot was funded by the Department of Defense to test the performance of protective clothing designed for hazardous environments. Importance is given to mimicking human-like motions and body-like conditions (sweating and temperature) to make sure the clothing is resistant. Sensors on the “skin” of PETMAN, beneath the suit, are able to detect chemical leaks.

It’s impressive to see how smooth the motions have become over the past year-and-a-half. You can see an older version of the robot below.

Boston Dynamics is an expert in engineering highly dynamic robots that require integrating information from numerous sensors and actuators. I’ve added other videos of their robots below, including Big Dog and Cheetah.

]]> https://robohub.org/two-new-videos-show-progress-with-humanoid-robots/ Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:38:34 +0000 http://robohub.org/?p=11795

Boston Dynamics has clothed their Petman humanoid robot to test hazardous conditions and to be able to detect chemicals leaking through the suit. 

COMAN, modeled on a 4-year-old child, from the Italian Institute of Technology, has a new video showing how COMAN’s variable stiffness joints which use series elastic actuators improve the safety and make the robot compliant with being pushed around yet staying on its feet.

]]> https://robohub.org/mits-cheetah-acquires-new-gates/ https://robohub.org/mits-cheetah-acquires-new-gates/#respond Thu, 31 May 2012 16:04:45 +0000 http://alpha.robohub.org/?p=398

In early March, Boston Dynamics posted a video (shown below) showing the Cheetah robot they are developing for DARPA running at 18 miles per hour (a new record for a robot running on legs), without any stabilization straps attached. More recently the MIT Biomimetic Robotics Lab has posted videos of their version of the Cheetah, first walking (no longer public, as of 08Aug2012), then trotting, with some stabilization (shown above). The MIT version appears to be more complex than the Boston Dynamics version, particularly in the way the legs are jointed, but also in the way the rear legs connect to the rest of the body, although it’s impossible to tell whether what appear to be vertebrae, in the MIT version, are actually functional as such, from the video alone.

Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah running at 18 mph…

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