In the final days of 2020, robotics company Boston Dynamics wished everyone a Happy New Year in the most awesome and slightly unsettling way: with a dancing video of three of their robots, Atlas, Spot and Handle.
The video immediately went viral, for all the right reasons: here were three, very precise and competent robots dancing better than many actual humans can ever dream of. And they were dancing in-sync, with fluid motions and near-professional dancer’s attitude. Boston Dynamics would later reveal that all this took more than one year and a half to put together, which made the feat all the more impressive.
In that video, Spot, aka the robot dog, was no longer headless. It had something that looked like a long mobile neck, with a head that was just perfect for lip-syncing to The Contours’ Do You Love Me. It was widely assumed that neck and head were added specifically for the purpose of making the dancing video better.
As it turns out, that’s actually an arm with a camera-fitted in-gripper. As shown in the video below, this arm allows Spot to do a new range of motions, from dragging objects, to turning valves and levers, opening doors and, why yes, picking your dirty socks off the floor. It even allows it to indulge its green thumb and do some basic garden work, and draw with chalk in the parking lot.
Spot is now enabled for mobile manipulation, Boston Dynamics says. The user can choose from manual, semi-automated and fully-automated actions, using Spot to maneuver, inspect or manipulate with “essentially unbounded” reach. Spot’s new abilities are highlighted in the video at the bottom of the page.
“The behavior shown here was programmed using a new API for mobile manipulation that supports autonomy and user applications, as well as a tablet that lets users do remote operations,” the robotics company explains.
That said, it still looks like Spot has a neck and a head, but it’s awesome nonetheless.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
Would you like AUTOEVOLUTION to send you notifications?
Google News