Boston Dynamics Demonstrates Autonomous Task Performance of Their All Electric Atlas Humanoid Robot

Boston Dynamics is arguably the world leader in robotics demonstration videos and if their autonomous capabilities start to improve, they may become competitive in robot automation one day. Earlier today they released a demonstration video showing their all electric Atlas moving engine covers between storage cabinets.

To alleviate suspicion that this demonstration might be teleoperated by a man behind a curtain, they have labeled the video with Fully Autonomous and I see no evidence to doubt that claim in the video presented. As a Ph.D. working in robot autonomy, I'm pretty impressed by this demonstration of autonomous capabilities. They even unplugged the tethered shore data and power. They do not make a claim about if all of autonomy is computed on-robot, but it is pretty common in the current state of affairs at most robotics companies for heavy perception and motion planning to be done off-robot on edge computers.

They show some picture-in-picture overlays of perception processing showing that they are tracking key points on the storage cabinets and that they render a 3D model of the engine cover for planning it's 3D motion in and out of the cabinets. This seems reasonable, but I'm wondering how much of the perception for this demonstration is done by additional sensors in the environment. For example, when Atlas is picking engine covers out of the origin storage bins, they are completely hidden from site. Being able to track hidden objects well enough to manipulate them is really impressive if they are only using onboard sensors.

When Boston Dynamics originally unveiled the new all electric Atlas, the shakey rag-doll motion was pretty disconcerting and borderline horror movie. The motion seems to imply infinite rotation power and data couplings between some of the joints of the robot, which raises my eyebrows from a reliability standpoint. But I have to applaud how this demonstration shows a significant amount of orientation decoupling in their algorithms. The head can observe any direction relative to the body can walk in any direction relative to its orientation. Really cool stuff!

References

• Watch The Full Video on YouTube