This is not the droid you were looking for....

A new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings. It is specialized for mobile manipulation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects. This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.

This version, along with a reluctance to get on the Google bus, has led Google to sell this rather recent acquistion.

Robot wars: Boston Dynamics fell out with Google over humanoid Atlas "At the end of day what I saw was a sense of us and them instead of a we — we weren't part of Google; we were sort of a separate thing."

According to Bloomberg, internal emails show Google feared the general public to be unreceptive to the teaming of the powerful Atlas humanoid with Google's impressive AI technologies – that perhaps it would associate the robot with the terrifying Skynet robots in Terminator.

Fast forward to 2016, and it looks likely that Boston Dynamics will be sold to Toyota Research Institute which, according to Nikkei, has welcomed several Google and Boston Dynamics veterans into its fold. Toyota might also take the Japanese robotics firm Schaft – which also recently announced a bipedal robot that can handle rough terrain – off Google's hands.

But even with new masters, the question is, "Can the robots forget their early abuse at human hands?"

Sadly, even with this advanced technology, Atlas is still subject to varying levels of abuse by human trainers, who push the robot over and knock boxes out of its hands. When the AI revolution begins and squishy organic lifeforms are hunted to the ends of the earth, remember this video. Boston Dynamics presents the 'next generation' Atlas robot

Posted by gerardvanderleun at June 18, 2016 1:46 PM