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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome, but until someone solves the real-time sensing and modelling problem, it'll never fly in the real world. The use case is still warehouses.

Here's my logic / assumptions: How does the robot "know" (have sufficient model information to predict the response) that the board will hold it when it does a vault? It doesn't -- it is told to vault by placing one limb on top. As we've seen with self-driving cars, where the sensing is 99% of the problem, that's the barrier between a closed set and the real world.

Don't get me wrong. The fact that Atlas / Boston Dynamics is in a state where the sensing is _mostly_ what remains a problem is astounding.

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Wouldn't it be great, though, if humans were no longer working warehouse jobs that strain their backs and their bladders?

Yes! Your warehouse would have to be a cleanroom (someone left a can of soda? Your robot just smashed through a shelf when it tried to step on it)

In general, I'm an AI researcher and an AI skeptic. After 10 years in robotics, I'm learning that the Human Is Cheaper and where Human Is Expensive, we prefer toasters, not terminators. (just enough hard-coded / hard-wired adaptivity to get by with tons of supervision)

> Your warehouse would have to be a cleanroom

At which point you're back to an automated assembly line which needs very little dynamics or intelligence. The whole point of developing such advanced robots is so that you don't need to worry as much about that can on the floor.

Depends on who profits.

I don't think we need anything humanoid for this though.

Whenever I see the four legged dog robot, I wonder how far we are from the chevaline in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

It's easy to forget sometimes, in the era of cars, how much we gave up when most people in industrialized society stopped riding horses.

It's pretty hard to get a horse to careen off a cliff or straight into a tree. The largest risk for riding a horse drunk is that it'll inadvertently scrape you off on a low-hanging branch.

Well, Scottish king Alexander III. died in 1286 when his horse fell off a cliff with him, but that was after sunset, and this kind of death was weird enough that we still remember it.

The # of important people who died in a car after a driver error is much higher.

Horses are easy to startle and they will crash into a tree at 35mph just to get you off their back when startled. They also don't like people standing or walking behind their backs; being kicked by a horse is a common injury, sometimes fatal.

> Ten army corps were observed over 20 years, giving a total of 200 observations of one corps for a one year period. The period or module of observation is thus one year. The total deaths from horse kicks were 122, and the average number of deaths per year per corps was thus 122/200 = 0.61.[1]

[1]: https://www.mathsnetalevel.com/2406

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