When Boston Dynamics first revealed their ATLAS robot last year, the bipedal humanoid robot was a clunky, slow moving contraption tethered to a jumble of cords that performed a variety of controlled tasks awkwardly.
Now with help from the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), the ATLAS robot has received programming updates that enable it to walk like a human with more agility and control than ever before. Even more impressive is the robot’s ability to walk over a pile of jumbled cinder blocks while easily maintaining its balance. Although the ATLAS continues to perform these tasks slowly, its increased coordination and expanded capabilities are important milestones achieved that will only improve with time to include even greater agility and eventually, speed.
Its construction and development funded and overseen by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the ATLAS robot is approximately 6 feet tall and weighs about 330 pounds. The ATLAS is made out of aircraft-grade titanium and aluminum with blue LED lights mounted inside its chest. The humanoid owes its agility and balance to an onboard computer that receives information from a laser rangefinder and stereo cameras that survey and gauge the robot’s immediate surroundings.
[via Gizmodo]