Looks like they've taken the criticism from Google et al. to heart. It was hard to see how the huge, gas-powered robots louder than lawnmowers were going to work for anyone except maybe military applications. Put some state of the art Google AI into this thing and it's not far from a sellable product!
But they're mostly silent on the matter of how much autonomy the robots are operating with. I never know how much of their behavior is human directed, or how those directions are conveyed to the robots.
I am a little bit disappointed that they are not using deep learning for robotics. Instead, they are simulating the robot based off a model, using Control Theory. It might be easier to get results from Control Theory but it doesn't offer a path towards more complex behavior, like Deep Learning.
They're doing this right. They have a very good basic body control system. Now someone can build higher level strategies to get work done on top of that. That's how biological brains work, after all. Google/Alphabet could, for example, reuse much of their automatic driving software as high level control for this robot.
Google should have BD manufacture a few hundred of those machines, and try to get the cost down to $25K or less per unit for that production run.
I would have to practice with the controls for a really long time to be able to pick up a soda can that deftly, though.
While they are not using deep learning, I think they're doing good work building a platform that can later be controlled via neural net or whatever. The control-theory-based balance and locomotion means that the lowest-level aspects of operation will not demand resources from the neural net and provides the prototypers in the meantime with a way of experimenting to see what body designs might be most effective.
Google is working on the deep learning aspect of finding out what to do / action and how to do it.
The control theory remark above is true, however even with deep learning, you can start your estimate of the parameters with the current control state, which reduces training time significantly.
What exactly does using electric actuators over hydraulics buy us? Less noise, greater efficiency, and reliability. Reliability is very important for both house hold and industrial robots. We typically measure reliability in terms of Mean Time Between Failures, aka, how long it typically last before breaking. For industrial robots this is important as the higher the reliability is the more money it makes. Industrial robots tend to have MTBFs of 100,000 hours or about 10 years.
Reliability is also important for household robots too, a big expensive robot that breaks down all the time appeals to few people.
Battery life will be a problem, but it's clearly agile enough to plug itself in for a recharge.
These robots are amazing in their realism of behavior that I find myself referring to them as creatures rather than robots.
Watching them get kicked makes me feel bad for them, just like I would for an animal, and watching them fall on a banana makes me laugh, just like I would if an animal or person did (so long as they weren't seriously injured, unless I didn't like them :P)
I felt bad for it.
We could have right now a RoboDog, with some machine guns on it and let them patrol and secure a perimeter. Fire at anything it moves. I hope they solve the issue with the banana peel :), though.
1: http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/9-killed-in-army-horr...
Its sad that this is thought of as the innovative use of RoboDog.
They really have leg control and balance software figured out now. That machine is more agile than any of the previous BD machines.
That said, the way it moves around and can keeps its head steady is both really cool, but somewhat terrifying... It seems to conjure up scenes from movies where the antagonist robots are scanning a target before deciding to kill or not.
https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hv-kG4NOcjymzhIBMnzFNFo7Uqc...
Hacking is an interesting one, only because current laws assume the perpetrator must be in proximity to the crime.
However, this robot is almost certainly not autonomous with the operator hidden behind the camera. Because it's not autonomous, it's going to be difficult to teleoperate over the internet. Telerobots are slow and not very capable[0]. With lag, it's going to be difficult to stab someone with a knife much less pick up a knife.
However, even slow telerobots present interesting legal issues. One might hack a telerobot in the home of some people who are on vacation and use it to unlock the doors so some guy can go in and steal stuff.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-softwar...
If you are seriously worrying about such situation you should also worry that robot can pick up the weapon.
Sorry, I was lucky enough to be born in a country where I'm allowed to defend myself. And if a robot or a person starts raping me, I'm not going to let them finish until they wear out.
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