Off topic for the site but cool anyway!

BigDog from Boston Dynamic. New video with much improvement in the product!

[uk.youtube.com]

This is the only robot that impresses me. I don't like non-dynamic walkers of any sort. An amazing job.

Demented

... wow, thats impressive - especially the 'dance' on ice and the single-step-walk over the stones ...

When i heard 'dog' and 'robot', then i remembered another video - [www.chilloutzone.de]

Let's fab some robots and artificial pets to play with next

Viktor

Now that's just a little spooky, looks to life like, soon packs of them will be chasing you through the woods for crimes you didn't commit!

---

Ian
[www.bitsfrombytes.com]

No, the crime of reading books...

The famous Boston Dynamics robot; designed for moving soldier's gear across rough terrain. Looks like to people grasping each others shoulders. They should do the talk show circuit with this robot.

Something weird I noticed about this video. When the robot is shown slipping on ice, I get the same feeling I get when I see a person or animal slip on ice; the movement of this machine is so animal-like that I feel empathy for it when it looks like its in trouble.

... last i followed a documentation about the "Dacota"-dino-mummy in tv, where they simulated the biped-walk of the hadrosaurs and T-rexes - it was funny to see, how the biped's in the simulation 'learned' to walk and run from scratch in a progressive learning curve.

After some hundred thousands 'lessions' the programm managed to steer the simulated dinos in rough terrain and in virtual battles or stampedes.

This learning algorhithms with simulated Neural-Network-computing are so capable now, that you can give any mechanical setup as input and after the learning phase your system would be capable to move like a real beast, be it a biped, quadruped or a snake- or spider-like crature ...

Viktor

Might be easier if it has a "seed" of behavior to build off of first though.

... true, but it's much funnier anyway, when your 'beasts' learn on their own and present you some astonishing alternatives

Look on the Framsticks-movies here: [www.frams.alife.pl]

Viktor

Funnier but much more expensive. Boston Dynamic pays out big when BigDog falls down without catching himself. Not so when a virtual beast falls over.

Demented

AFAIK the best way is to program on your computer a 'real' physics-engine and simulate with the same parameters as your robot would have - when learned, transfer the 'grown-up' neural-network from the simulation into your real bot.

Then it 'plays and falls' in the virtual sandbox and would restart in the real life with some basics ...

Viktor

Meanwhile:

Here is a video of a little mobile drumming robot:
[video.google.com]
Homepage:
[letsmakerobots.com]


And here is a video of a high-speed pick-and-place robot.
[gizmodo.com]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2008 09:17PM by SebastienBailard.