ATLAS, Boston Dynamic’s great robotic hope and the obvious star of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, is one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever created. It’s capable of surprisingly human like movements and motions, and could one day replace soldiers in the battlefield the same way drones have replaced pilots in the skies.
https://gizmodo.com/its-confirmed-darpas-atlas-humanoid-can-officially-r-1441073262
As long as those battlefields aren’t as messy or debris-ridden as the floor of the average teenager’s bedroom. Because as this test footage by Florida’s Institute for Human & Machine Cognition demonstrates, ATLAS comes so close to easily sauntering through all of this random debris, only to lose its footing on one errant two-by-four. Let’s just hope the nation’s enemies don’t see this video and start a lumber arms race. [YouTube via IEEE Spectrum]
