On April 18th, a new video of a robot exploded around the world, in which the robot is very flexible and can stand directly from the ground, although it is still a humanoid robot, but the posture is extremely weird, which directly frightened the audience! The robot in the video is developed by the robotics company Boston Dynamics, and is a new generation of Atlas electric robots that are completely electrically driven!
On April 17, Boston Dynamics bid farewell to the humanoid robot Atlas and announced the retirement of the hydraulic robot, and Atlas can be said to be a super Internet celebrity in the robotics industry, aiming to explore the limits of the robot's full-body dynamic movement and two-handed operation, Atlas can perform a series of complex actions, and even complete actions beyond humans, such as the classic turn forward flip below.
Boston Dynamics is arguably the most famous robotics company, and has gone through several ownership changes, from MIT spin off, to Google Alphabet, Japan's SoftBank, to South Korea's Hyundai, Boston Dynamics was founded by a group of technocratic engineers and scientists, and for many years although the technology was very advanced, it did poorly commercialize.
This year, 2024, is also the year of the robot explosion, and at the NVIDIA GTC conference, Huang showed off a compelling scene where he shared the stage with nine different humanoid robots, all of which were provided by Nvidia and various robot companies in cooperation with the chip hardware platform.
At the moment when many entrepreneurs have entered the robot market, Boston Dynamics announced the retirement of hydraulic robots and the debut of a new generation of electric robots.
As you can see, Boston Dynamics' new electric robot is more flexible, with its head able to rotate its head 180 degrees like an owl, and the neck joint may have a high-degree rotation mechanism. After the head is rotated, the torso is able to follow the rotation, which involves the robot's entire body balance and motion coordination system, requiring precise sensors and algorithms to achieve a smooth turning action.
There is also a circular screen on the head that decorates the ring light, presumably a camera that communicates visually with humans, and the ring light may be used to express the robot's own emotions and state.
The following action has become the focus of everyone's attention, the robot's legs are folded back, touching the ground at an incredible angle, and then the legs are kicked, and the whole robot stands up, such an action is rare in human or traditional robot design, first of all, each joint needs to have a very high degree of flexibility of freedom, the legs of the entire robot need a very powerful electric drive system to provide sufficient torque, and the robot must also have a perfect balance control system to keep the robot in an unstable posture to stand.
The robot continues to bear on the Altas name, and throughout the history of Boston Dynamics' technological development, it has evolved from a robot that was obsessed with a hydraulic version of the robot to a more human-like, lighter robot with an almost human-like body shape and no exposed cables, and the new electric Atlas has a better chance of commercial use than previous robots.
With Hyundai's acquisition of Boston Dynamics, the company began to move rapidly toward commercial products, and was preceded by the Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot. At present, Boston Dynamics also has many competitors, including Musk's Tesla Optimus Prime robot, as well as many humanoid robot companies in China, including industry, service industry, AI robots and other directions.