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CHANCES ARE YOU remember Boston Dynamics, the robotics company Google acquired back in December, and the collection of animalistic robots it has developed.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with its work, it has also been working on another humanoid robot called Atlas, and for its latest demo, it reenacted the crane kick scene from the 1984 movie, The Karate Kid, while balancing on three cinderblocks.
The 6.2 robot weighs more than 300lbs (21.4 stone) and while it doesn’t move flawlessly – it wobbles around a little bit when lowering its arms – it’s still able to keep its balance.
The robot was programmed by IHMC Robotics, which uses the Atlas robot for its DARPA Robotics Challenge (a competition aimed at improving ground robotics capabilities when dealing with disaster response situations).
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Not quite the slick karate robot I was hoping for. Even those shite slopey door wedge shaped contraptions on robot wars would school this pile of junk.
About 15 Years ago Aibo the dog was launched as a consumer product, its quite depressing really the rate of progress thats been made since then. Judging from this, I think I will be waiting a while for a robot butler to boil up the spuds for me dinner.
How long do you think it will be before robots like that replace that vast majority of the global workforce and we’ll be left with a population of around 8 billion that will serve no real purpose to the ruling people.
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