This humanoid robot showed off it can move, pick up and lift objects of different sizes across obstacles – as well as perform a 540-degree flip.
Boston Dynamics is a cutting-edge robotics company that's spent decades behind closed doors making robots that move in ways we've only seen in science fiction films. They occasionally release videos on YouTube of their life-like machines spinning, somersaulting or sprinting, which are greeted with fascination and fear. As we first told you last year, we'd been trying, without any luck, to get into Boston Dynamics' workshop for years.
Anderson Cooper: The space of time you've been working in is nothing compared to the time it's taken for animals and humans to develop. None of these made it out of the prototype phase. But they did lead to this. It's called Spot. Boston Dynamics made it not knowing exactly how it would be used.Hannah Rossi: So Spot is a omni-directional robot. So I can go forwards and backwards.Robert Playter: This is the real benefit of legs. Legs give you that capability. Hannah Rossi: I'm not doing anything special to let it walk over those rocks. There you go.
Marc Raibert: This is inside Atlas's brain. And it shows its perception system. So, what looks like a flashlight is really the data that's coming back from its cameras. And it-- you see the white-- rectangles, that means it's identifying a place that it could step. And then once it identifies it, it attaches those footsteps to it, and it says,"Okay, I'm gonna try and step there.
Marc Raibert: Which is managing its body, its posture, its energetics. If you told it to travel in a circle in the room it can go through the sequence of steps. But if you ask it to-- go find me a soda, it's-- it's not doing anything like that. To do that, Boston Dynamics has recruited roboticists with diverse backgrounds - there's plenty of Ph.D's, but also bike builders, and race car mechanics. Bill Washburn is part of that pit crew. Anderson Cooper: How often do these need to get repaired?
Kevin Blankespoor: You can drive it around with a joystick. And at times, that's the easiest way to get it set up. But once it's ready to go in a truck and unload it, you hit go and from there on it's autonomous. And it'll keep finding boxes and moving 'em until it's all the way through.
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