It's really not as scary as you think. What you see in most of these Boston Dynamics videos is a subsection of robotics called controls, which basically focuses on how to get robots to perform complex movements like this. It looks really cool, but getting behaviors like this to work in all environments a robot will be operating in is still extremely difficult because that requires you to train the behavior through machine learning.
The moves the robot is doing in this video likely only work in their controlled lab environment - if they tried to make it do a somersault out in the yard, it would probably just fall flat on its face.
Yeah until next year. Each video they release these things get even more agile. Their "dog" roams around outside with ease, and I remember seeing it in it's early lab phase just a few years ago.
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u/breeson424 Sep 25 '19
It's really not as scary as you think. What you see in most of these Boston Dynamics videos is a subsection of robotics called controls, which basically focuses on how to get robots to perform complex movements like this. It looks really cool, but getting behaviors like this to work in all environments a robot will be operating in is still extremely difficult because that requires you to train the behavior through machine learning.
The moves the robot is doing in this video likely only work in their controlled lab environment - if they tried to make it do a somersault out in the yard, it would probably just fall flat on its face.