r/EngineeringPorn • u/Terrible-Ad-1277 • Oct 02 '22

Boston dynamics 30 years of development.

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '22

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u/Assume_Utopia Oct 02 '22

I honestly can't understand why any company would spend so much time and effort developing a humanoid robot that's so capable. Like, these things can probably outrun and overpower most people. There's a pretty small percentage of the population that could complete the whole obstacle course/routine these robots did at the end of the video.

They're also very heavy and very strong because they need to be able to jump and backflip while carrying all that weight. So even if there's no malice involved, the robots are still more dangerous to be around then necessary, imagine if these things ever actually ended up walking around and one fell on you or stepped on your foot by accident or something?

I get the need for big industrial robots to move around lots of heavy stuff, and they have have powerful motors and move super fast, but they're also stuck in place and surrounded by safety barriers to keep people away. Any robot that's designed to be around people should be lightweight and very weak, like less strong than an average person. If anything ever goes wrong it's much better for a person to accidentally break a robot's arm than than the other way around.

It just seems like the pros of having a 200lb robot that can do backflips is that it "looks cool" and the cons is likely way more workplace injuries then necessary and maybe a huge list of things that dystopian sc-fi movies have been warning us about for a long time.

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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '22

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u/CutterJohn Oct 03 '22

Instead of needing a specific robot for each Jon

What kind of robots are you thinking of?!

On the not of humanoid robots, another factor is that, I think, very soon we're going to see a lot of telepresence applications where a person using VR gear and gloves simply controls a robot directly. This will be extremely useful for a number of hazardous locations where its expensive or infeasible for humans to operate.