We’ve seen Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas robot going for a stroll, being pushed around, and even doing backflips. So what’s the totally-not-the-Terminator’s-grandfather doing now?
Running—as usual, in a convincing and therefore quite alarming fashion.
[Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjSohj-Iclc&w=560&h=315]
Boston Dynamics, a former Google (GOOGL) unit that’s these days part of Japanese mega-conglomerate SoftBank (SFTBY), released a new video on Thursday that showed the Atlas robot going for a jog.
The Boston Dynamics robot also jumps over a log, although we’ve seen it do that before. Then again, it apparently needed to stop before making that jump, so perhaps we’ve identified the best way of slowing down the marauding robot hordes.
The Atlas robot video wasn’t the only clip Boston Dynamics released yesterday. It also published this footage of SpotMini—a vaguely canine robot that we saw opening doors earlier this year—autonomously navigating its way through an office and lab.
The SpotMini robot was trained for that excursion by being driven through the facilities before, but with that memory in its system, it could apparently make its own way—negotiating stairs along the way—without bumping into things.
[Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve9kWX_KXus&w=560&h=315]
Good boy? We certainly hope so.