For what it's worth, my friends who did robotics work were pretty impressed with this video, too.
I wonder how much of what we think of as distinctly "human" (or "animalian") movement nuances are simply things that come out of how staying balanced on legs actually works. This robot certainly moves like an animal, and I doubt any of that was specifically intended by the designers.
I felt surprised at how bad I felt for the darn thing when the guy tried to kick it over on the ice. It was hard not to anthopomorphize the sucker, even though it was only a machine, and every action within it a deterministic routine understandable by mere humans. (By that notion, so is the Sphex Wasp "only a machine.")
A lot of my own work has to do with humans' tendencies to anthropomorphize robots (and to assume, even when the robots tell them not to, that robot consciousnesses come with exactly the same assumptions as humans). This is just one of those stories that feeds into my own imagination.
The reason the thing is noisy in the field is because it has to carry its own power supply, and a gas-powered generator is the best power supply available; in the lab they have electrical cables for the thing. I wonder how many klicks per liter it gets.
I watched the first half trying to find the video editing, looking for the comfortable response that this was two folks in a costume. When I realized it wasn't, I began to wonder what it would feel like to see 500 of these with AT cannons mounted on them moving through a batch of Russian tanks. So spooky.
While I'm sure it's being developed for military use (isn't everything?), I keep thinking of the search-and-rescue possibilities of a robot like this (especially while watching it climb over the bricks).
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I wonder how much of what we think of as distinctly "human" (or "animalian") movement nuances are simply things that come out of how staying balanced on legs actually works. This robot certainly moves like an animal, and I doubt any of that was specifically intended by the designers.
A lot of my own work has to do with humans' tendencies to anthropomorphize robots (and to assume, even when the robots tell them not to, that robot consciousnesses come with exactly the same assumptions as humans). This is just one of those stories that feeds into my own imagination.
The reason the thing is noisy in the field is because it has to carry its own power supply, and a gas-powered generator is the best power supply available; in the lab they have electrical cables for the thing. I wonder how many klicks per liter it gets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFR