How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Her name is Monica Thomas. Her dance company is called Mad King Thomas. Here is her brand new Twitter account: https://mobile.twitter.com/onetruebonc
Her sense of humor is captured by her choice of the song “Do you love me”, which is a winking but still charming reference to the fact that this is a PR stunt to get us to love scary robots.
Dancers and choreographers are poor, and struggle to build careers. A public acknowledgment of something of this magnitude would be so impactful, and would require so little from Boston Dynamics. I wish they would do it.
They could even brand themselves as helping artists, could be good for their image.
Neat Easter egg. Though I'm not sure I can reconcile being both critical of and centrally involved in the same PR stunt.
Unfortunately, I don't know that I can trust any of the organizations that would have the budget to control enough of these robots to make a difference in any direction.
Which is sad to me, as I love this from a technological perspective and looking at a best case scenario.
Yes, I would likely have to add-on other modules over the course of time, but $75,000 for Spot's capabilities is actually pretty reasonable.
I haven't really thought of a use case for the home, although there's literally dozens of them. I actually wonder if it could function as an auto-dog walker for my organic dog on the days when I'm too swamped with work to do so.
The thought of attaching a leash to my dog and the leash to Spot while I'm indisposed is actually kind of attractive. I would have to make sure my dog has already done her business though, since I wouldn't want to be the kind of asshole that not only uses a robot to walk his dog, but also lets his dog shit on his neighbor's yard while a robot walks his dog.
Having worked in robotics quit a bit this is a common trap. There are plenty of things that we can think of for a robot to do, but most of them would require more concessions, programming and maintenance time than it takes to just do the task, or hire folks to do it. The areas where the value prop holds up it really works well, but these kind of low value, high complexity applications like walking a dog around the neighborhood without dragging it by it's collar if the dogs knee hurts and it walks slow that day.
A $75k robot arm with legs is not a completed application. We can already buy robots with the needed mobility to do things like walk dogs for far less. This is a classic hammer nail situation. I think this is the issue that BD keeps running into, they have an amazing team, amazing tech, amazing capabilities, but are still searching for that killer high value application. There are over 400k industrial robots sold every year, its a huge market. They sell well because it relatively straightforward to program and integrate them into workcells and factory lines to create value. To program and integrate one of these robots to do something so complex that it would necessitate a BD robot and not a standard industrial robot would be a huge development effort. It just doesn't hold up when we have folks that need work. The cost of one 75k robot plus two person years of engineering labor is 4 or 5 years worth of traditional labor. The value prop just isn't there until our ability to control, program and integrate these complex robots (cobot stuff) gets better.
They promise "repeatable autonomous missions to gather consistent data", so my guess is programming a route and mapping terrain is reasonably easy. There is also remote control and camera access, if that could be triggered to automatically notify you (or a dog walking central command service supervising), for example when your dog is barking/complaining or resists to being dragged, it could go a long way to solve dog walking (for smaller dogs).
When you ultimately drill down to brass tacks though, you're left with a chicken and egg scenario. We need better programming and integration for this to be time-effective. We need more time programming and more time integrating for this to be a value proposition.
You don't get there without some idiot like myself saying, "I could spend 1000 hours walking with my dog... or I could spend 1000 hours programming my robot to walk my dog..."
Be wary of renting to any penguin, if you do buy Spot.
Once mass produced, not even close.
Think of:
- training costs (training grunts isn't 100% free) - pay as soldiers wait to go on missions - and here's the BIG one, medical care - and lastly?
PR! PR, no more "soldiers coming home in body bags". Why, you can fight any war you want, and no one will get upset about your soldiers dying. Yet beyond that?
How do you negotiate with one of these things? How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up?
Right now? Regardless of if it’s controlled by remote or by AI, the sensors are probably easier to fool than an in-situ human would be.
What sort of fear do robot soldiers have? None. How does it make people "upset", if a robot soldier is blown up.
Now think on the converse.
Right now, suicide bombers take out soldiers, but almost always take out innocents around those soldiers. Often, children are killed.
Now, imagine the locals knowing that absolutely no enemy will be killed, just a machine, but dozens or more of their friends, family may be killed.
How long will suicide bombing last, when the only human casualties are the local population?
Sure, this would make it less likely to use suicide bombs against soldiers — perhaps even politicians will put skin suits on the robots and use them for public appearances a-la Westworld for similar reasons — but grenades and RPGs and anti-material rifles and IEDs would likely all still be used.
And £10k robots can also be used by terrorists, perhaps stolen from warehouses, perhaps hacked.
That said, what worries me about terrorism is not cargo-culting shapes that look dangerous (be that robots which look like the Terminator or 3D printed guns), it’s people with imagination who know there are at least two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only the stuff in a normal domestic kitchen and methods taught in GCSE chemistry.
And terrorists? Sure, but an explosive truck is probably easier than one of these. And if sales are controlled, then they won't have a domestic army of them.
In terms of hacking? 100% agree. It's why I find Tesla's OTA updates to be, frankly, insane. Full control of things like brake firmware has been demonstrated, with an OTA fix to brakes in the past.
This means that, along with autonomous modes, you could perhaps manage to (especially with an inside man), force-push updates, regardless of driver permissions, to all Teslas out there. And set them to run into everyone they find, just run over as many people as possible.
So there is tonnes of risk, and anyone thinking "Oh, they'll secure thing $x" is, IMO, a damned fool. Hack, after hack, after hack, after hack, proves this to be absurd.
We literally cannot lock down anything. Anything. Not CIA infrastructure, not any corporate infrastructure, not government infrastructure, not health care, nothing.
So I agree, 100%, robots with guns = horrid, just from that one angle. But I contend that they are cheap, and effective, so you can bet governments will use them.
The link?
Your reference to chemical weapons. I see the concern, yet I'm more concerned about genetically engineered death. And training people from (for example) China on how to do this, seems beyond absurd.
The future is biotech created death I think.
Another example, genetically engineered animals, designed to kill as well. How about mosquitoes, pre-loaded with viral payloads? What about bacteria which infects well water, and is literally impossible to ever get rid of, once in the wild? How about a fungus, which destroys wheat, which primarily the west eats, yet the east doesn't (rice)?
How about gut flora/fauna, which when fed (eg, when you eat), releases a mind altering substance? A poor fellow was infected with yeast, which made him drunk every time he ate, so imagine a genetically engineered set of bacteria which releases a mild hallucinogenic? One that makes it impossible to concentrate?
How will you cure this, if your scientists can't think straight? Or worse, what if it's an aphrodisiac? Let's try to solve a problem, when you can't keep your hands off of yourself.
I can think of so many endless horrors, and most of them biotech related.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-canada-universities-r...
I disagree — $10k is much cheaper than a new truck.
Or do you use them like drones paying soldiers to run them from a container in Kansas. In which case you have the soldier still.
As time passes though, especially on an actual open battlefield, raw 'kill everything that moves" becomes more of a potential too.
However?
My logic was predicated upon cost, and if implemented, cost reduction due to all those body bags. You think Nixon and Kennedy were purely motivated by the cost of US soldiers, when they wanted out of Vietnam?
They sent those troops there to begin with!
No. They cared about the PR issues, and re-election.
You are correct it does make it cheaper (maybe, eventually), but so do bombs or gunships or drones.
These are hella complex machines though. A gun is absurdly simpler as is a drone. And the ground is a lot messier than the air.
The logistics of servicing/repairing them is also going to be hefty. Tanks are a pain for maintenance already and they are much less complicated.
This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, ofcourse in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace.
There will never be world peace, unless humanity is no longer human, or alternately, under the boot of an all encompassing empire ruled by force.
To believe otherwise, is to believe history teaches us nothing, nor our knowledge of human behaviour. To assume that we somehow have a culture which "can do this", that our modern beliefs are "enlightened" enough to allow this, is the ultimate in hubris.
Sure... humanity couldn't do it before, but now? Now, we're just ever so enlightened and perfect enough to enable world peace.
There are only two real ways to enable world peace.
1) Genetically engineer the entire species to become more... social. Kill or prevent any 'old style' human reproducing. End the old species. There are innumerable issues here, including "we're just messing around with what we barely comprehend".
Yet our entire culture is predicated upon how the human brain works, and the human brain works more on genetics, than post-birth learning.
OR
2) Take over the entire planet, killing everyone who disagrees with you, and ensuring that due to the technology involved there can NEVER be a revolution. Further, destroy and hunt down every single person which does not swear fealty ; allow no external empires to form. Ever.
NOTE: I am not happy about this, yet, this is reality. Let me put this another way.
You want world peace? OK! Great!
First, you'll need to end all murders, thefts, all anti-social behaviour. "World peace" is denied because of the genetics that create this behaviour. They're the same problem.
We're lucky to be able to communicate to each other in civil manner without ripping each other apart for food. Pretty incredible to be a human!
That will go away once Climate Change reduces the ability of the planet to produce abundant resources needed for the modern way of life. The remaining carrying capacity of the planet will force a move back to subsistence farming and with that comes the inevitable brutal environment.
LOL as for blobs of meat, well, me and a couple other people I know would be unwilling to part with our meaty blobs, for a whole bunch of reasons ;)
21 years ago, when I started writing a cross-platform digital audio workstation called Ardour, I was convinced that your claim above applied to contemporary mixing consoles. It seemed to be that they had evolved in ways that were deeply constrained by physics/mechanical/electrical engineering, and that there were all kinds of things about their design that was just unnecessary baggage from their crude history.
Two decades later, I understand how that evolutionary process actually instilled those designs with all kinds of subtle knowledge about process, intent, workflow, and even desire. It turns out that the precise placement of knobs, and even their diameter and resistance-to-motion, rather than being arbitrary nonsense derived from the catalog of available parts, rather precisely reflect what needs to be done.
Don't be so quick to dismiss your physical form or the subtle wisdom that evolution can imbue.
There's also the whole "situated action" sub-field of AI, which is centered around the idea that humans build themselves physical environments to embody and maintain knowledge in order to reduce computational load during decision making.
Yes, but better not make them look human. Humans are bad at tolerating more/equally intelligent species, just look at homo sapiens versus neanderthals. Hell, even between races humans are barely tolerant.
But knowing that our math itself has a limit, and we are already pushing that limit with some problems it is naiv to think that the human brain is all that much capable. (Interestingly enough we are intelligent enough to somewhat know our limits - like the complexity of ZFC) While once singularity happens, an AI has basically only material limits to the complexity it can manage (though what I found beautiful is that even that would hit a limit not necessarily higher than we do - like there will be a busy beaver number it can’t reason about)
Though to day, the most dangerous murderous machines we have created have been cars.
What's next?
And yes, it’s just a puppet. For now. A human controls its movements.
What’s missing is a brain. And that will come in Version 4.0. Or whenever they perfect a decision and control system, for fully autonomous decision making.
That’s when you should worry.
Or rather. You’re probably safe, if you live in one of the western allied nations. That is your privilege.
But a black, brown, red, or yellow person in the 3rd world should worry. Because they will be the target of America’s oppression, via this robot.
Meaning that: your 3rd world country had better accept democracy and western media, and have your leaders approved by Washington DC, otherwise we will deliver some freedom to you. I hope you enjoy the fresh smell of napalm in the morning. You get bonus points if your country has oil.
It is also false in this context. One of the most massive bombing campaigns in recent history was in European Serbia, and the hotspots of today (Syria, Iran) have a population that looks like Greeks.
As for black: the only predominantly white country that systematically sticks its fingers into Subsaharan Africa is France. The only external power that grows its presence in the Third World overall is China and given how they treat their own population, I would not be surprised if the next wave of pseudocolonial wars was Beijing's.
...or accept replacing a democracy with an us-friendly "anticommunist" dictatorship.
This looks like us so it’s easier to see how we’re threatened by it. It’s more visceral. My cats don’t care about my vacuum but if it walked and jumped their neutrons might fire differently.
Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano
No one is going to send a fleet of these ultra-expensive Robo-Killers to assassinate you and everyone else on the battlefield. Once these micro-drones can be mass produced cheaply enough, and you can put enough high-explosive on them to fly up to a person's neck and !!pop!! someone's head clean off, you'll see them programmed with swarm behavior and be unleashed onto the battlefield.
They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. More than enough capability to swarm entire battalions and wipe them out.
>They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time.
And can be trivially defeated by some netting, blinded by bright lights/lasers, and/or knocked out of the sky by leaf blowers and umbrellas. Despite what certain propagandaesque sci-fi "warning" videos would have people believe, I'm least worried about these nano-drones. At the end of the day bullets are still cheaper, less complicated, and more effective. And as soon as you give the drones some standoff capabilities to mitigate some of the countermeasures, you start loosing many of the perceived "benefits" and are back to just using guys with guns.
If an enemy force has already made up its mind to kill, I don't see this making it any easier/more reliable/more effective than well-established alternatives.
How would you feel if the dance contained some choreographed "mow the people down" moves?
It all depends on the context, I can't see John Cleese turning into a genocidal dictator anytime soon, while we all know what the people in the second video did only a few years after those images were filmed. For what it's worth I see the robot in this story closer to the second video than to Cleese's comedic genius.
> But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live.
> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers. And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.
No, but events are. The question of how to use a tool arises from the existence of the tool.
> otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold
You're still just responsible for your own acts, and they for theirs. If you were being a dick to them needlessly, that's your fault, and if it tipped them over the edge, it's natural to feel bad. Not fully responsible, but also not as if you had zero to do with it.
Just like when someone gets bullied and commits suicide, you don't just look at that act of suicide and talk about who had the most agency and what one should focus on.
> You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers.
There is no need to "focus attention", and holding one party responsible for their actions is orthogonal to holding other parties responsible for theirs. This is a tech forum, Weizenbaum was one of the greats when it comes to writing about technology and morality, and I dare say it is the responsibility of technologists to be familiar with his body of work.
> And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.
That's why I don't, and never hinted at doing so, and even clearly stated the opposite when I said "All links in the chain are responsible for what they do".
In the era of sword and shield, for example, combat effectiveness is hugely dependent on raw upper body strength. That means that strong healthy men rule all domains, while women, children, any men not in top physical shape are helpless before them.
In the modern era of mechanized weapons, personal size and physical ability are much less relevant. There's a much greater ability for small groups to make their opinions felt. Victory in large battles tends to go to whoever has the best tech and greatest quantity of it. It's probably a better world overall.
The real question is, exactly how will any "killbots" work, and what effect will they have on society? Maybe they'll be super-expensive and centrally controlled, and nobody better dare to move against whoever ends up in charge of them. Maybe they'll be cheap and plentiful, so anyone with a grudge will be even more able to cause chaos. Maybe something else we can't imagine yet. I have a feeling we'll find out eventually, one way or another.
Less-able men with more ability to marshall resources/rewards can convince more-able men to be their proxies by paying them . How would they have the ability to do that? Technology, knowledge, cunning, guile.
How long has it been since the king was the best fighter in the realm? I mean, seriously?
There are of course exceptions, such as persuading or paying someone else to fight for you, or concealing a weapon, getting someone to trust you, and stabbing them in the back, etc. It still seems to shape much about reality to know that the majority of people will have no chance of ever winning a remotely fair fight against the enforcers of whoever is in charge.
If it had the ability to upload detailed maps of buildings you should be more concerned.
If it was designed as an initial stepping stone to develop into a smart and versatile killer robot...
I would encourage her to reach out to the marketing/PR department and have a conversation avail herself for interviews etc.
I would imagine that a young woman doing something this dynamic in a relatively dry field would actually be a PR dream.
>> There’s a lot of impressive moves in the routine, which was choreographed by dancer Monica Thomas in collaboration with the Boston Dynamics team.
https://www.boston.com/news/technology/2020/12/29/boston-dyn...
They also link her name to https://www.madkingthomas.com/
I still absolutely hate those robots. This won't end well.
Perhaps they'd have a chance if they used a different form factor, though.
Care to expand on that? I'm very cynical about Boston Dynamics, given that - as far as I can tell / know - they've only done tech demos and again as far as I know don't have significant commercial success, or their robots doing things outside of (carefully orchestrated) tech demos.
disclaimer: I never actually looked on their website for user cases or whatnot.
SpaceX are using one because I think simply because someone thought it'd be cool. You can remotely inspect a launch pad without shelling out $75k+ using RC cars and drones, for example. It's much cooler and better for the company's overall image, though, if you use a Spot robot. PR is a thing after all and using Spot fits perfectly.
I seriously doubt there's any difficulty with safety or "being good enough", as I've yet to see an application for Spot that couldn't be done just as well by conventional already existing means.
BD is a group of enthusiasts that build cool robots, not a company that primarily develops robotic solutions.
however the real bugaboo begins when one is used wrong regardless of where that occurs. like facial recognition we are going to need some serious regulations on how law enforcement uses these. I don't expect issues with fire and rescue but they would get secured by the same laws.
As in, if they end up in use to secure assailants and there is an injury to that target or worse bystanders public reception will tank quickly. Let alone if robots ever got employed against protestors.
that perception will change radically regardless in the world where it happens because not all governments respect the rights of their citizens to the same degree and it becomes only a matter of time before abuse happens and its film.
on a side note, we certainly have enough movies and television presentation of the bad uses of robots; though most if cyborg type; to give people pause but will it give lawmakers pause?
Looking at what the US military has been doing with drones, that scenario doesn't seem that far fetched.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12129348/dallas-shooting-b...
This scenario will remain science fiction until we invent a compact power source with an energy density (by both mass- and volume) matching fossil fuels.
The military has no use for loud and cumbersome petrol-powered monstrosities like Big Dog (which is why the project was axed) or underpowered robots with an endurance that's measured in minutes (like Spot) in combat scenarios.
Once such power source is available, though, the independence and versatility of a human in power armour would still be far superior to a remote controlled robot that can be hacked or have its comms jammed with COTS equipment...
Ah, its battery runs for 90 minutes.
Yep, and that's best case, too (e.g. not running Lidar or complex processing for autonomous function at the same time).
Minutes sounds a bit shorter than it is, but nevertheless anything with an endurance under 2 hours cannot run for hours pretty much by definition ;)
For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero (1980's Sweden overtaken by armed robots, including robot dogs).
Given the current state of these machines, both these environments would favour humans. Even a fairly untrained average Jane or Joe would have no problems outrunning these things in forests or urban environments, let alone a trained soldier. Not to mention the lack of autonomy.
Everything you see in these promotional videos is carefully choreographed, prepared and pre-programmed in advance for days, and edited:
"There were definitely some failures in the hardware that required maintenance, and our robots stumbled and fell down sometimes." - they shot the first part several times and kept the one that worked best. That's not something you can do in the field outside of a controlled environment.
These robots are still long ways away from posing more of a thread to a soldier than much simpler solution, e.g. a Humvee with a mounted machine gun.
> For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero
The game is based on fiction, not fact, though. The required autonomy just isn't there yet and the video game robots clearly run on magic, not electricity or petrol. They never overheat, they are maintenance free, and they move faster than is currently possible w.r.t. motion planning and image recognition.
It's your typical AM/FM affair: BD is actual machines - pre-programmed or remote controlled, very limited endurance and still impractical for most military applications.
The robots in video games and cinema on the other hand are for the most part in the domain of fucking magic - capable of "120 years of continuous operation on a single power cell" like the Cyberdyne Systems series 800 v2.4 (Terminator), turning themselves from "autonomous swords" into screaming humans (Screamers), are nearly indestructible like Vision (Marvel's Avengers) or strange spiky flying thingamabobs like the Sentinels (Matrix trilogy).
I guess I just struggle with understanding how this changes anything.
These robots know roughly where they are, what positions their limbs are in, how balanced they are, and what movement they should do next. That's about it. They cannot understand Asimov's three (*four) laws, or even a single sentence of English, and have no choice over their own actions as a whole.
Both here and anywhere else the Boston Dynamics robots are shown off, half of the comments always come back to the "scary robots" that will take your jobs and murder your family. I wish we could hit a big reset button on how the public at large perceives robots because I personally think that there is a lot of benefit to be harvested here, for the true benefit of mankind.
Question is... what are current goals of Boston Dynamics? Do they even see these robots used for non-military widely used scenarios - construction, medical care, first-responders etc? Are these things even possible for the things where cost is an important factor (unlike military, where cost is not that important)?
Just like you also don't see them saying "Thanks to PwC for developing our software."
We don’t know that. Perhaps it was important for them to not have credits in the video; e.g. to keep attention on the robots. Your sister is credited elsewhere in BD’s article, see other comment [1].
To me a manufacturer doing a video that focuses on their products for their youtube channel is definitely an "advertisement".
> this is surely not a SAG film
SAG states that "Choreographers and assistant choreographers are covered for purposes of health and retirement contributions only." [1].
I am not sure about the exact number, but the dog-like robot can handle at most 30-40 kilos of weight, maybe the humanoid a bit more but in the same ballpark. The most dangerous would be the rolling one, since it has a counterweight, and crashing into someone would be bad but that’s it.
They are absolutely not your average “able to lift 1 tonne” hydraulic arm robots that could indeed barely notice a human as resistence in its movement.
> We definitely learned not to underestimate how flexible and strong dancers are—when you take elite athletes and you try to do what they do but with a robot, it’s a hard problem. It’s humbling. Fundamentally, I don’t think that Atlas has the range of motion or power that these athletes do, although we continue developing our robots towards that, because we believe that in order to broadly deploy these kinds of robots commercially, and eventually in a home, we think they need to have this level of performance.
I would love to ask your sister, that is Atlas was a human, what age would it be, in terms of skill of dancer? I think this is an interesting parallel along what people say "This computer is as smart as a 2 year old."
Maybe age isn't the right measure. I would say that these robots move like a 3-year-old kid who has been practicing a particular motion sporadically for a month or two, but not like an active 3-year old who has been practicing the same motion for a year.
If you compare to the kids who do martial arts or gymnastics or some serious sport or whatever, by age 6 or 7 the kids are leaving these robots in the dust. (The robots are still amazing though.)
The 5-and-under crowd just generally swarms around the stage, with little attempt at "dance". The 6-8 year olds are beginning to dance, at about this level -- though I would say I saw a few movements by the robots that were remarkably expressive.
It's a bell curve, and there is certainly a right tail of kids who are far better than these robots at age 6-8. The median, however, is about on par.
I am just talking about how smooth and graceful the individual motions are. By age 3 kids who practice something a lot (say, running around barefoot at the playground) are starting to get pretty fluent at it.
The kids have a lot more sensory input, a much more subtle and refined musculoskeletal system with a whole ton of tiny stabilizer muscles, and a pretty impressive neural architecture for learning and refining motions, compared to these robots.
(Which again, is not to criticize the robots, which are also amazing! It is hard to beat 600 million years of animal evolution.)
It's not the first time I've noticed that; drones can also be quite graceful. But the dynamic motion of that pendulum is such a hard problem, and as you note, the three year olds solve it with unconscious ease.
Never as gracefully, and there of course the machines have a huge advantage. I spend most of my brain power keeping the tense muscles very tense and the loose muscles very loose, for each and every one of those tiny stabilizer muscles. The machines move straight and smooth in a way I never will. I haven't mastered the simple art of standing there in first position, and probably never will.
(I am not, I would note, any kind of expert. I dance at the level of an 11 year old. Maybe a 10 year old. Which took me years to learn, and I'm very proud of it.)
You might find the book The Inner Game of Tennis useful.
Ballet isn't something that feels right when you do it correctly. It's actually a deeply unnatural way to move. Not just pointe, but everything. The grace is an illusion layered on top of that.
You definitely do need to reach a point where most of it is handled by the sensorimotor system. But there will always be something you need to keep working on.
More generally speaking, I'm especially curious if "anyone" buying a Spot would have adequate access to be able to do similar things.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to not been possible for warranty reasons...
There's more documentation at https://github.com/boston-dynamics/spot-sdk and https://dev.bostondynamics.com/. However, it looks like a lot of the choreography is built-in; you can call twerk() or butt_circle() (documented at https://dev.bostondynamics.com/docs/concepts/choreography/mo...) but you don't have access to the raw kinematics, gyros, and accelerometers to generate your own unique moves. It would be amazing if they'd release the full routine to cause your Atlas or Spot to perform the dances, but I'm not aware of that being public anywhere.
For a more general example, check out this video where Adam Savage used a Spot to pull a rickshaw; his programmer was able to work with the API to change the payload tuning of the robot:
https://youtu.be/zyaocKS3sfg?t=1482
It appears that the API is more about what you'd need to make Spot useful in an industrial or demonstration context than to build your own Spot. They want something that a generalist can make do useful stuff out-of-the-box, which makes sense.
On a separate note, I was reading up on Boston Dynamics just the other day and was surprised to see that they are now owned by Hyundai (Google X sold BD to SoftBank who sold them to Hyundai). I guess was surprised to see non US-based ownership because I had always assumed the US government had some interest in the core technology.
https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/Protectorates-a...
It took 40 years and somewhere well above $100 million to get to a minimum viable product. First DARPA, then Google, then Softbank. It helps having long-term funding.
Remember that, when you think automation can come later.
This dance happened because Monica Thomas could drag-and-drop motions as if she was programming a MIDI sequencer, generating text files on her laptop, pushing data from the PC to the robot with some Python and protobufs. Other manufacturers doing anything like this is rare, and they're nowhere near as fluid or graceful, because it involves a robot technician tediously jogging the robot around with a teach pendant in the way all industrial robots have been programmed since the 70s.
IOW, to achieve the similarly appearing moves, these robots have got to have a lot more strength to achieve the balance that comes naturally to most dancers: also why you rarely get 7ft/2.1m tall dancers doing the ballet/gymnastics style stuff — their weight distribution and "levers" (limb length) are so much different, making many of those moves doubly or three times as hard.
And focusing on their strength in the quotes in the article also downplays dancers' exquisite motor reaction time to reestablish balance (kudo to our brains is what I am saying).
"...as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.
"This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely human" and "fully human" entity is the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot seems overly "strange" to some human beings, produces a feeling of uncanniness, and thus fails to evoke the empathic response required for productive human–robot interaction."
The comment referred to robustness, not endurance.
Spot can walk about for 90 minutes top and the more it needs to do (e.g. running additional sensors, performing autonomous functions, etc.), the shorter its battery life will be (I'd guess around an hour is more realistic).
Bipedal prototypes like Atlas wouldn't last that long. Think 20 minutes or so for a heavy robot like that.
Automated warehouses for example don't use legged robots that climb ladders, operate forklifts, and carry boxes around.
Interestingly, the bits of manual labour still required in these areas (e.g. factories) are cheap in terms of manual labour and not doable with the same level of efficiency with even the most sophisticated robots, let alone bipedal ones (you'd change the factory to accommodate to the simplest possible robot design, not vice versa).
Atlas on the other hand is still a prototype, so it's not optimised in that regard and also much bigger, heavier and bulkier. I'd guess it doesn't last longer than maybe 20 minutes or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VGsfgo8_Jo
Although the dance moves are different, the spirit is synchronised :)
Any atrocity has been done by humankind already.. we didn't wait for robots.
2. ???
3. Profit
"Atlas’ current dance performance uses a mixture of what we like to call reflexive control, which is a combination of reacting to forces, online and offline trajectory optimization, and model predictive control. We leverage these techniques because they’re a reliable way of unlocking really high performance stuff, and we understand how to wield these tools really well. We haven’t found the end of the road in terms of what we can do with them"
Sure it's impressive, but I wonder how it helps the casual viewer to get an idea of what these robots can actually do. One could say that's the whole point of PR but...
It sure helped BD engineer to push their robots forward (as said in the article).
Literally. Like in the demoscene sense.
And it doesn't matter that the robot couldn't possibly coordinate everything in the video on is own. The software doesn't just have to coordinate high level "go here, move like this", you also have the lower level coordination that sits between the collision avoidance and basic driving etc and the $gcode_variant driving the servos. I'm guessing that stack gets a major overhaul every time one of these videos gets made, like almost every Hollywood movie has a massive "software development" section because of all the artistic direction that needed new or changed functionality.
The original video showing Spot moonwalking had the most imperceptible of splices in it right at the end of the moonwalking bit. Several months' worth of development alongside careful use of multiple scenes in this newer video have mitigated the need for hacks like that. It's nice to see.
You can't script an unstable system without feedback. Any tiny perturbation would cause the robot to fall over. You need to actively control the system to counteract the instability.
So there will be some (scripted) goals, and a very complicated control algorithm that tries to reach the goals without falling over.
“We used simulation to rapidly iterate through movement concepts while soliciting feedback from the choreographer to reach behaviors that Atlas had the strength and speed to execute. It was very iterative—they would literally dance out what they wanted us to do, and the engineers would look at the screen and go ‘that would be easy’ or ‘that would be hard’ or ‘that scares me.’”
—Aaron Saunders, Boston Dynamics
Also, the people involved including the author are participating on this page. With respect, this guideline might be relevant:
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
(So am I. That’s why I got pissed.)