He is 1.5 meters tall, weighs 75 kilograms and despite his abilities, he is not a budding Olympic gymnast, but a robot. Humanoid-looking Atlas has been developed by the robotic engineering company Boston Dynamics , which has just unveiled its new abilities. These have made it a true viral phenomenon on social networks.
If at first, when it was presented back in 2013, it was capable of walking in a way that is quite similar to how humans do and handling tools, in the last four years it has been updated and evolved and this bipedal robot is capable of tackling uneven terrain, jumping from one platform to another – even if they are at different heights – executing 180 degree turns and … the great feat, which highlights its revolutionary capabilities: it can perform back flips and, with a perfect execution, landing on your feet, fully balanced .
It is not a trivial thing to be able to jump backwards. This is an important improvement, because although these capabilities of a walking, jumping, and a hundred thousand watermarks are something that we are used to seeing in science fiction films – there is nothing more to remember, for example, ‘I , robot ‘(2004) -, in real life, getting a machine to possess this type of skills is very difficult.
As proof of the difficulty of accomplishing such a thing, you can take a look at videos from the Darpa Robotics Challenge (DCR) , held from 2012 to 2015 and which aimed to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that could carry out complex tasks in scenarios. extremes for the human being, in disasters and humanitarian emergencies. In them you will see that some robots had a really bad time to maintain verticality at certain times.
The Atlas project was funded in the past by the Agency for Research on Advanced Defense Projects (Darpa), precisely within the framework of the DCR challenge. At that time he was 2.25 meters tall and weighed 150 kilograms, and his hands could manipulate tools, but he had a lot of room for improvement, for example in terms of balance and mobility . So in the last four years since its introduction, Boston Dynamics has increased all its skills.
If in this video of Boston Dynamics, of just 54 seconds, we can see him exhibit an unprecedented ability in a robot, jumping on platforms of different heights, giving the now famous back somersault and raising his arms in a sign of victory, in another, too Recorded by Boston Dynamics, he appears hiking in the woods, walking smoothly on snow-covered ground, and getting up on his own, without the need for any help, when he is thrown to the ground.
Imagen: Boston Dynamics
