New Video of BigDog Quadruped Robot Is So Stunning It's Spooky | Hacker News Reader

New Video of BigDog Quadruped Robot Is So Stunning It's Spooky

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192 pointspaulsb91 comments

One thing that struck me was when it was kicked or almost fell, I felt a little bad for it. I can see where the general public might someday award robots rights because we instinctually anthropomorphize them. I felt silly--I "know" it's just software, but what about the rest of the world with the same instincts and no understanding that's it's mindless code?

I felt kind of bad in Trevor Blackwell's latest video where he was stopping Dexter from moving towards him. :(

I started constructing dialogs in my head along the lines of "Father, why don't you love me?"

dexter: "one day, old man, you'll pay for this"

the arrival of LOLbots is inevitable.

Too late:

http://lolbots.com/

(went there to check if the domain's still available)

This excites me. If they become common, people are going to spend a lot of time exploring the world -- an antidote to sitting behind your laptop all day.

These things would make great pack animals. When you go hiking, you'll be able to toss your gear into one of these things and have it trot along behind you. You'll be able to take more risks because robots will be able to rescue you from tight places. If you get tired or sick, you'll be able to ride them.

It's funny to think that the streets of San Francisco in 2100 might superficially look like a town in a developing country. ("Oh, those aren't mules in the street, they're robots.")

I admire your optimism. It is indeed exciting technology, but I think this will have military applications long before it is available for public use.

For now, Roomba will have to do.

eh, I kicked my roomba... and it broke.

gotta get one of these pack mule buggers...

Just watch out. Pack mules kick back.

"You'll be able to take more risks because robots will be able to rescue you from tight places."

"In other news, the number of accidents this year has boomed because of the carelessness induced by the presence of friendly robots."

My question is why not a real mule? More flexible refueling options, has already been through many iterations, and not nearly as expensive. Seriously.

The bigdog is better at recovery when slipping on an ice patch. I need that.

Because this is only the beginning, and soon you'll have versions that carry ten times more than a mule, travel faster, and can be controlled remotely.

Interesting question. Perhaps we will witness a renewed proliferation of domesticated animals in this millennium, a sort of "domestication 2.0". Robotics may actually help inspire it, along with our knowledge of so many more kinds of animals. As robot designers study lots of different critters to improve their products, people will start thinking, "Hm, some of these animals have skills." The range of animals we've made use of so far is probably tiny compared to the range that could be useful. And our ability to breed or engineer them in desirable directions has improved a lot. So yes, maybe there will be real mules too, or some other kind animal we haven't thought of yet. (Have you ever seen guide horses? http://www.guidehorse.org )

The price tag is not a bug, it's a feature. What, you think DARPA would pay you millions of dollars to invent a real mule? Buck Rodgers movies didn't have mules!

I will say, though, that compared to the typical military-industrial spendthrift extravaganza, this project looks really worthwhile. Think: powered prosthetics for quadriplegics. Think: remote exploration of Martian mountains. Think: lots of generally applicable algorithms for real-time physics.

>Think: remote exploration of Martian mountains.

Think: Donkey in spacesuit

Ever heard the expression - 'Stubborn as a mule'

It's getting scary. It's not that we're going to have robots going haywire and killing people on its own. It's that the elite crust of humanity is going to use it againstt us. Think blackwater is bad now? How about when they're not even human beings?

The thing keeping the elites in check for all of human history has been that they can't get too crazy or their own soldiers will mutiny. Hitler was a study in charismatic leadership. He was able to commit atrocities only because the german populace liked him so much. WHat attrocities will be possible when it is impossible for your soldiers to disobey?

That's when the hackers here step in, right?

As long as hacking without a license remains legal.

Sense. Your comment makes none.

Hackers (or crackers, if you prefer) don't wait for permission.

Direct object. Your sentences use it unconventionally.

Anyway, I was being wry. You may not be waiting for permission, but it does matter if it's illegal.

(Clarification: I use hacking in the same spirit as this site, meaning to code with a hobbyist's or experimenter's ethic. Not meaning the media obfuscation of the word.)

What's scary is how much this comment reminds me of Reddit...

I understand, i'm usually against conspiracy theory bullshit myself. using robots on the battlefield is the only subject I get a little spooked over.

Robots on the battlefield doesn't spook me at all. It seems to me to be an improvement over sending people to risk their lives.

"It seems to me to be an improvement over sending people to risk their lives."

So, who are the robots fighting then if not people? I'm just thinking what a frightening thing it would be for an empire builder like GWB to have a conscience-less army of mechanical killers. At least our armed forces generally want to avoid killing innocents. Big Dogs with M50 machine guns don't care about such fine distinctions. So, yes, it could be scary.

Now, of course, as soon as these are available to the general public, I fully intend to exercise my second amendment right to own robotic death machines. That's in the constitution, right?

Because maybe, just MAYBE, when we realize our robots are fighting their robots and it's really just an expensive video game, we'll quit fighting and actually sit down and talk.

That is, if the robots don't join forces and turn on us first.

oops..spelling edit.

Nonsense. People don't sit down and talk when they have less to lose. They negotiate when they have more to lose.

So what will actually happen is that these ultra-tech tools will just further shield voters from the nastiness of war, and allow their leaders to visit horror on those less technologically advanced.

What I'd like to see happen is the creation of some kind of independent news agency that uses UAV and robot technologies to bring back uncensored, uninvited news back from warzones. Of course if this were truly effective, that news agency itself would become a target.

This is an overly simplistic and dangerous view of warfare. Increasingly, warfare is not about soldiers being sent to fight each other in some empty battlefield.

The pattern of U.S. wars since WWII has been expeditionary warfare where the U.S. sends its troops to fight with irregular forces, among civilians of other countries.

No war is clean, but this is a particularly evil setup, because the worst that American non-combatants experience is the return of their dead or wounded troops. On the other hand, the host country feels the full horror of war.

So, frankly, I don't care nearly as much about the volunteers who are sent to risk their lives as the civilian non-volunteers who are necessarily and inevitably harmed.

This is not a U.S. specific thing. It's just that as citizens of the top military power, Americans are spared the full horrors of war, yet have the ability to visit those horrors on others.

There is a reason why Europeans are not nearly as accepting of warfare.

The reason Europeans are not as accepting of warfare is because they screwed themselves over twice with it. War is always the last resort of negotiation. When nations become too belligerent or stubborn conflict will always follow. Europe forgot this lesson twice in as many generations and suffered the consequences.

There are only two ways to prevent conflict: 1. be reasonable in all of your negotiations and 2. make sure you are always ready for a conflict.

If you fail to do the first, others may see no choice but to fight you. If you fail to do the second, they may not see any downside to it. This boils down to one principle, you must always back every one of your demands, even the reasonable one which you have a right to, with sufficient force.

In short, there is nothing wrong with using machines to do our fighting for us. There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.

> There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.

You're assuming that these two issues are independent. I'm proposing that handing our rulers robot warriors will result in harder-to-expose killing of civilians and more unnecessary invasions.

Of course, if all the killer robots were working for me, I would deploy them wisely and reduce civilians deaths.

On a long enough timeline every discussion on the Internet converges on Hitler and Nazis.

To be honest, I'm quite tired of all this "ugh, this is so reddit!" I wish people would discuss the (de)merits of comments in their own terms.

OK. I'll explain why it reminds me of reddit.

The author of the comment in question uses tired populist cliché (elites) and tries to impose their own political views on the reader (you think blackwater is bad).

Which is likely to generate a long, heated and shallow political debate rather than a discussion about the technology (or about the social implications of the technology).

Blackwater being bad is not a political view; it is close to moral truth. I have talked to multiple US soldiers back from Iraq who have described Blackwater committing what would normally be war crimes. However, Blackwater is not subject to laws, so they're not war crimes.

Details of one of the incidents:

Soldier was in the Air Force, in northern Iraq near the Iranian border. They had a warrant to raid a house looking for a weapons cache. They did the raid with some guys from Blackwater. When they got inside, there was a guy laying on the couch watching TV. Normally, anyone inside a house during a raid would be put in flexcuffs. A guy from Blackwater just shot him, while he was laying on the couch.

>Think blackwater is bad now? How about when they're not even human beings?

Then they run at a lower threat level.

A humans's decision process: "Is that guy a suicide bomber? OMFG SHOOT!" A few minutes later: "Fuck sarge, I got scared. I screwed up big time."

A robot's decision process:

    if uncertain_of_hostility(target):
        speaker.warning() #This robot only costs us $50,000. Hearts and minds, right?
    else:
        fire_warning_shot(target, bystanders)

    ## if fu_bar(target): #Don't delete or uncomment this line, or else bad things will happen.

many issues in the next few decades will involve technology outrunning our ability to make ethical choices about their uses. what will the ultimate effects be of crops with terminator genes be? what happens when biotech created in a lab winds up mutating out in the wild? human cloning and genetically tailored babies are great examples that are emerging right now.

of these robots being used as somewhat intelligent disposable soldiers scares me the most because it is the easiest to abuse and the effects would be felt immediately. when it becomes a matter of pressing a button to suppress an uprising, who will decide when it is appropriate to press that button? remember that winners get called freedom fighters and losers get called terrorists. The USA wouldn't exist today if our "freedom fighters" hadn't resisted british rule.

I worked on the original hopping/jumping/running robots at CMU and later MIT with Marc Raibert. I can assure you that everything done was above-board, published, and open. Dr. Raibert is one of those rare scientist/engineer/entrepreneur types who is interested in progress for people. He was asked by DARPA to develop this vehicle, so he wanted to help them out.

The Sci-Fi stuff in these comments are, well, crazy.

Well, thank goodness for Dr. Raibert. And while we're at it, thank goodness for Albert Einstein.

It's the people who would exploit the technology developed by these benign characters that frightens me.

So it is perfectly reasonable to be paranoid about emerging technologies that have the capacity for great good or great evil.

I've got to say, this just looked like yet another in the line of CMU robot videos -- impressive, but only to someone who actually knows how hard this is -- until the kick. And then the ice-patch sequence, which is just awesome.

Kudos to you and your coworkers. This obviously represents one hell of a lot of patient work.

The Boston Dynamics site is here:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

It seems to me that there is a lot of promising work that will be done in this area of robotics. There is a recently published book on this...

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...

...which suggests we should evolve brains and bodies together in order to get the most natural/most efficient gaits from them.

I was watching thinking, "Yawn". Then it got hit -hard- in the side and use its 'elbows' to stabilize itself. I'm just glad it doesn't hit back (yet).

Yes, wait until it figures out that the best way to stay upright is to subdue the human before the kick can happen!

It seems like a very robust system, and the way it displays the ability to fail gracefully really demonstrates some amazing software. I am very impressed that they are able to un-tether it as well. The fact that they apparently were able to get the power plant and the processing hardware onboard is really very impressive.

I love this robot. It is the right way to do legged locomotion.

Leave it to "a few guys in a garage" to crush Honda's 15 year effort with Asimo. Granted, those few guys were key in the MIT leg lab...

Note that BDI is all about the mechanics. They haven't done much work on the perception side of things. If you work in that area, contact them.

It actually makes me think of a robot horse more than a dog.

Does that mean in 20 years we'll all be riding robot horses around?

Once again, the Japanese are way ahead of us... http://www.absoluteanime.com/saber_rider/index.gif

I want my Chevaline, dangit!

You know, I knew there was something weirdly familiar about watching that video.

Then someone remarked that it reminded them of a Hunter from Half-Life 2. Now I'm scared.

That was exactly what I thought too. It looks just like the new Hunters. Good thing it's being built for the U.S Military and not the Combine....

Here's the headcrab:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=Little...

And the standalone sentry machine-gun came out from Samsung a while back:

http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/samsung_develops_machine...

Forget the headcrabs -- what about those flying chainsaws in HL2?

Also: will the high school curriculum ever catch up? One of the wackiest 'long bets' offered:

"By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks." http://discuss.longbets.org/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=86

Wow, really impressive. The ice was amazing (though as someone with bad knees, transferred anthropomorphization makes me cringe).

Does anyone know why 4 legs was chosen? 4 seems better than 2 for stabilization, but why not 5, or 6, or 8? Maybe looking like a familiar friendly animal is an end goal?

Probably better for it to look like a friendly animal than a giant spider, although that could be nice from an intimidating militaristic point of view...

I'm willing to bet that it was literally and deliberately modeled after a large dog. Engineers borrow design from nature all the time because its much simpler than starting from scratch. Why reinvent walking when dogs already do it so well?

Probably the 8 leg design was already tried by nature and it was not successful for large animals.

Whether in nature or manufacture, those legs aren't free. Is four more legs worth the energy required to grow/build them, and could the mental processing power necessary to run them be used better somewhere else?

T3 is inevitable..

2-legged animals are no match for 4-legged robots that can't even be knocked over - just ask the target of a K-9 pursuit dog

This really has enormous implications over a lot of fields, not just military. I can see this technology being used in prosthetics, in home-care (walking bots), and all over the service industry.

The first thing I thought when I saw this video was "what's the stock symbol for this company?".

what's interesting to me is it's not even that difficult to get life-like, self-balancing, responsive motion, etc with basic things like feedback loops (eg segway.) i don't know what to blame most robots' relative rudimentaryness on except their designers' lack of knowledge about things like that. to me the difficulty is much more in the physical mechanics than in the software. though after you get the mechanics down, the software would become the challenge

I can't decide if the bit where he tries to kick it over or the bit on the ice is best.

I think the ice part is better--I doubt any animal would have recovered from that without falling on its side. What I really want to see is a bloopers reel from early in the project.

It seems that it is much easier to stay up with three or four legs than two. Just lock them into a slightly outward direction and you cannot fall. If you're on one or two though, you've really got to balance the rest of the system much more carefully.

Your comment got me thinking. From a technical point of view of traversing over unknown and uneven terrain, there really is no reason to go with bipedal, especially if it's easier to do control systems for tri or quadraped robots. Of the handful that can be bipedal (primates, bears, birds), it's not their preferred mode of movement. However, it's probably a psychological disadvantage for the robots to be 3 or 4 legged and work along side humans in a job that requires it to be treated as a human, like a waiter, house companion, etc. That alone is reason enough to continue bipedal robotic research.

For comparison, hikers on rough terrain usually bring a hiking staff and aim to keep at least two points of contact at all times.

I can see two legs being more efficient than four, but wheels are usually vastly more efficient than either..

There are only two real advantages to bipeds:

1) Height 2) Use of spare limbs for tools

Height doesn't seem to be much of an advantage for robots at this stage, and I think that robots could have 6 limbs with no problem. Therefore, biped robots are really only a novelty.

3) Use of human devices that are biped specific

Ladders, automobiles and heavy machinery, household equipment, etc. all rule out quadrupeds.

While it would be possible to custom-build all of this stuff to be usable by a quadruped, it means you then have to have two of everything if you plan to cohabitate with a robot assistant. From the perspective of assistance robots, it's not going to be possible to accomplish everything without bipedal bots.

I think wheeled bots (like Trevor's Monty) will also be a great option--probably a tenth the cost of a walking mechanism, an order of magnitude more speed and endurance, etc. But they'll still be unsuitable for many assistance robot tasks. Stairs, for example. And unlike the Daleks, leveling the building will not suffice as a solution to the problem of climbing stairs.

Well, not necessarily. Those devices aren't biped specific- they're specific to thing with grasping mechanisms.

Who's to say a quadruped robot can't have 4 feet + 1 or 2 grapsing mechanisms? Or have two front feet that are also capable of grasping?

While you can certainly have a 4 legged robot, 2 armed helping you around the house or a hospital, only using grasping mechanisms to climb the ladder to adjust the satellite dish on the roof, help you with the dishes, or get you out of bed, I think it's important to consider the reaction people have to a robot's form factor given its job.

You and I might think it's really cool to have 4 feet and two arms (like a centaur!), but if a robot reminds someone of a gigantic insect, and it's suppose to be a household companion/housekeeper, people might reject having it around the house. That's a good reason to have bipedal robots.

But on the other hand, if you get close, but not exactly with bipedal robots, people might get even more freaked out with the uncanny valley.

Good point.

Personally, I'd love to have a robotic centaur helping me around the house.

Think Centaur.

Like those ED-209 bloopers...

He's alright but dexter can do it while wearing some sweet shoes: http://www.anybots.com/videos.html#walking_080302_title

DARPA was the original ycombinator!

for a long time it seemed like two guys with their head+torso stuck in a funny box. but truly, wow !

edit: it seems very close to AT-ST from star-wars though.

Skynet became self-aware at 2:14am EDT March 28, 2008.

Aw, c'mon. I can't believe people voted me down for this one. No one else thought the 'bot seemed eerily self-aware?

I thought the way its legs moved and the way it stumbled and rebalanced were extremely lifelike. I was wondering how they control it - is it as simple as a remote joystick? Just point in the direction and it figures out how to get there?

Wow! Amazing.

Hah, it slipping on that ice is hilarious.

The jump is the best are you kidding me?! It's like Jordan haha

That is crazy. It is almost like a real dog - which are free.

The real future is with genetically engineered dogs, horses... to run faster, cary heavy loads etc. We have already done it through selective breeding and soon we will be able to program DNA (see Craig Venter, Dawkins...).

These robots are so mechanically complex that they will ultimately fail. Nature (evolution) is the greatest designer. What complex robots have hit the mass market? None, because they are just too many moving parts.

Animals can even reproduce!

You just did see a video of one of the most advanced prototypes(!) of a robot and you think it will fail because such things are not yet seen in mass market? Somehow that made me smile :)

How many planes have you seen in people's driveways? The mass market is not a sign of success, all products have to start somewhere.

These robots will remain the realm of military and rescue missions because they have so many damn moving parts. Quality control is what drives up prices and quality control is exponentially linked to moving parts. So my argument is more along the lines of:

"This robot is technologically amazing and promising, but is built upon a foundation of complexity which inexorably leads to limitations".

I don't think the reason you don't see planes in people's driveways is because of their complexity. Nearly all consumer products are increasing their complexity each year and there's no reason to think that this trends stops. Just take a look at any modern car and compare it with an old one. If people want such robots enough those robots will be produced for the mass market.

And the first application which did spring to my mind immediately was transport. There are so many situations where an automated transport, which does not depend on wheels or rails, would be useful that I can see a huge market for this.

The first mass market might be in the industry. But once prices fall there are also lots of possibilities for this to reach the consumer market. Certainly normal people also can have uses for such transports. Be it as intelligent luggage, as a tool for the garden (replacing the wheelbarrow) or simply as a very cool toy for the kids (just think of riding those things!).

This is a completely new way of automating transports and so I expect it to have an extremely large impact in the following years.

i think we are in deep shit. there is no way that such robots paired with artificial intelligence do not take over the world. we are a few years away from it. humans will self destruct not by killing each other, but by creating robots that will be out of control.

Don't forget the sharks that shoot lasers from their eyes.

Or the dogs with the bees in their mouths, and when they bark, they shoot bees at you.

That's nothing compared to dogs that can be trained to sick specific parts of the human male body!

Well, only if we give them the ability to be self-powered and reproduce without any help. The first is feasible, but the second is so difficult that I can't see it happening by mistake, or being worth the added complexity compared to just making non-self-reproducing robots on an assembly line (on Earth, at least).

My impression has always being that if we create AI that can tweak itself to become even more intelligent, they will simply look a us with pity, smile, pat us on the head and fly away to explore the galaxies in their brand new interstellar ship.

I'm just glad we get to see in advance what will be chasing us through the woods in a few years, the thum-thum thum-the-thum music playing the background, firing M15 bursts over our shoulders before the camera pans to the blackened sky.

It's going to be sweet.

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