You swing over obstacles, jump onto platforms and even do a backflip!
The American robot builders from Boston Dynamics have published a spectacular video in which two of their so-called “Atlas” robots move independently through an obstacle parkour.
The special thing about it: the robots were not told beforehand how to overcome the obstacles. Instead, the seemingly human machines scan their surroundings in real time and decide for themselves how to move through the terrain – and even end the obstacle course with a somersault!
Several months of work for a minute of video
In In another video, the engineers behind the roughly 1.52-meter-tall robots, which have already been under development for ten years, explain that the difficulty was not in teaching the robots the individual movements, but in teaching the robots to run the obstacle course without errors and to be completed in one go. For the one-minute clip, the team needed several months and countless attempts before the robots made it through the course without errors.
So it doesn’t work completely without human help after all …
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