My geek uncle (oh, wait... that's all of them, sorry) sent me this video of the Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot. Watch long enough to see it slip around on the ice or be knocked to the side by one of the engineers. Truly amazing stuff -- way more advanced than I was expecting. Kinda freaky too.
Enjoy watching humans hobble along behind nature,
Bp
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2 comments:
oh my god that is freaking wild.
I did some work in the robotics area. The computational aspects are interesting. The various components of the robot (for example, the 4 legs, in this case, must move independently but in a coordinated manner. The movements and responses also differ based on the leg in question (LF, LR, RF, RR).
You can think of it as involving four instances (more, actually, for sensors, etc) running simultaneously over different sets of data. The data are changing in real time, including information from the other programs.
And, this has to happen within the real-time constraints of the particular task.
It's interesting both at the algorithmic level (how does any given leg figure out how to move based on the current data) and the systems level (how do you glue all of the software pieces together).
OK, OK, more proof that I am a geek.
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