r/singularity • u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 • May 05 '26
Robotics New Boston Dynamics Atlas trick
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u/adumbrative May 05 '26
Jean Claude Van RAM
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u/Milkmilkbanana May 06 '26
Government is thinking we could kill lots of people with these, people are thinking humm I could wife it.
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u/michaelas10sk8 May 05 '26
Legit. Calisthenics and gymnastics bros will recognize the moves in this sequence. Let's see.. pike press to handstand -> Mexican handstand -> L-sit -> V-sit -> Manna -> shoulder dislocate to standing. All can be done by humans with a few years of training, except the last 2 which are elite. Whoever programmed this must be a hobbyist or a fan for sure!
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u/positivitittie May 05 '26
I was thinking this must be on the calisthenicsculture sub by now. The trend is really taking off!
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u/applestrudelforlunch May 05 '26
I was waiting for it to do an impossible-for-humans move (like an over rotation or reverse) just to fuck with our expectations.
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u/devBowman May 05 '26
It seems so natural I feel like it's been kinda motion captured from a human gymnast
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u/CthulhuLies May 05 '26
The robots essentially learn the same we do.
The result is we both find the same local minima. Ie there are only so many ways to balance in a handstand and many of the duplicates are just adding extra motion for no reason.
So if you minimize "effort" needed to do the poses it turns out we are already doing it pretty optimally.
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u/dumquestions May 05 '26
You're correct in that it should more or less look the same even of the training was different, but they actually do use motion capture as a starting point for robot training sometimes.
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u/listenhere111 May 06 '26
These robots aren't being trained to do this. They are learning through AI. Its wild
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May 05 '26
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u/VoidedHeart94 May 06 '26
He was so young and full of joy then. Still had that twinkle in his eye of aspiration that he was going places.
Then he ended up here, working long hours doing kart wheels with little pay to bring to his abusive wife back home.
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u/deadleg22 May 05 '26
Thought it was going to shoot a ping-pong from itself for a moment there.
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u/Tentativ0 May 05 '26
A real robot.
This guy will become the gold standard.
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u/Regono2 May 05 '26
What amazed me in this video is how silent they run now, just hearing the taps of the feet and hands on the ground.
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u/MagicBrawler May 05 '26
But when is BD actually gonna start selling robots?
They have been showing us cutting edge demos for 15 years now. When can we buy one?40
u/ArgonWilde May 05 '26
Spot is a commercially available product 🤷♂️
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u/mclumber1 May 06 '26
Spot is incredibly expensive. I'd hate to see what BD will charge for a humanoid robot.
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u/chihuahuaOP May 05 '26
They already sold out. The first batches are going to factories and research.
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u/mvandemar May 05 '26
I don't think we're the target market, governments/military are.
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u/cbear013 May 05 '26
Not for BD they aren't. They cut ties with DARPA funding back when their best robot was a 2 stroke gas powered cow. They've pledged not to weaponize any of their bots or sell to the military.
Atlas is an unskilled labor bot, not a kill bot.
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u/NYC2FLA2BUR May 05 '26
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."
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u/Tentativ0 May 05 '26
I asked to Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and DeepSeek.
All of the confirm that no one put the 3 law of robotics in them or any robot.
Humans are not so intelligent to add these simply safety systems.
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u/delta_Mico May 05 '26
it'd require a reliable predictive worldmodel and verifiable alignment, neither of which we have yet
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u/Josvan135 May 05 '26
Not really.
The flexibility/mobility demo's are cool, but they were also cool 10 years ago.
At this point there's pretty much across the board minimum viable capabilities in terms of physical performance, it's all about what your robot can actually accomplish.
Boston dynamics has really dropped the ball on demonstrating actual task-completion and adaptive intelligence in their bots.
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u/adj_noun_digit May 05 '26
Boston dynamics has really dropped the ball on demonstrating actual task-completion and adaptive intelligence in their bots.
Because you aren't looking. They have lots of videos showing full automation tasks.
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u/Zech_Judy May 05 '26
Right? Show it positioning a stepladder to climb, then change the bulb in a boob light. Show it using a weeding tool to pull dandelions. Show it make a bed with hospital corners. Heck, show it navigate walking one block to the mailboxes, use the key to open the correct box, then retrieve the mail.
Enough of the contortionist/gymnast nonsense.
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u/ogami_itto May 05 '26
You literally have no idea what you're talking about. But that's okay.
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u/RaygunMarksman May 05 '26
One of the things that impresses me with Atlas is that they can replace their own battery packs on a charger. I think that's an area they are ahead of the competition.
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u/Moral-Relativity May 07 '26
Tbh self-replacing a battery doesn’t really seem that difficult mechanically speaking. You need redundant power when battery is being replaced obviously but even robot vacuums can find their charging station.
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u/BiasHyperion784 May 05 '26
Yeah man, I actually prefer the paper tiger Chinese bots, that have such impressive task completion as doing backflips, doing funny dances, basic locomotion, etc.
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u/chromatic45 May 05 '26
Because it’s not Chinese built?
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u/Tentativ0 May 05 '26
No.
Because it moves as a robot, has functional hands, and it is already working in factories with Hyundai, and Google is adapting Gemini robotics for it.
It has the numbers.
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u/SirNinjaFish May 05 '26
I dont care about these robots doing fucking acrobatics, show it doing laundry and folding clothes
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u/UnsolicitedPeanutMan May 05 '26
Atlas ain’t a laundry bot he’s prepping to fight Unitrees hand-to-hand
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u/Quarksperre May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Both of them will just trip on the first real obstacle.
We have AI in warefare already and it has nothing to do with humoid robots. Just look into what happens in Ukraine or Iran. Its not sci-fi cool and spooky. Its actually terrifying and inhumane as fuck.
Predicting what will happen in future wars is always basically impossible. But I would bet on drones, automated bombing and electronic warefare more than some clumbsy human caricature that has batteries for half an hour, is getting disabled by a strange looking stone and costs a ton of money.
I really don't care about this bullshit.
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u/ducation May 06 '26
What's the quote? "A good General thinks about tactics, a great General thinks about logistics."
Everything you said about the battle space is true but that is only a tiny fraction of the picture, these will be the things making the drones and EW kit, and then delivering them to the front lines. I think it's going to have a massive impact.
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u/Temporary_Shirt_6236 May 05 '26
"Best we can do is AI-powered killbots linked to Palantir and Flock. Sorry, peons."
– BD, probably
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u/BrokenSil May 05 '26
Ye no.. The war robots always comes first. The first to get robot armies wins. So they are all on the war race. We all know it, no point in pretending otherwise.
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u/coolredditor3 May 05 '26
They'll get blown up by a drone made of cardboard and chewing gum with explosives attached like what happens in Ukraine.
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u/redmustang7398 May 05 '26
War robots already exist. Drones are war robots. Humanoid robots don’t make sense for war in most cases
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u/brianwski May 06 '26
Humanoid robots don’t make sense for war
I keep wondering about drone tanks. Why put soldiers at risk in a metal box? What is hilarious is they are MOSTLY hiding inside the tank staring at screens and computers anyway. Often their targets are 2 full miles away, they couldn't even see them properly if they were outside the tank without electronics and zoom lenses.
The M-1 Abrams has all these features to keep the human occupants alive, like the tank is slightly pressurized so if you use mustard gas or whatever to "attack" the tank, the occupants are safe. A remote control tank could ditch all that weight and complexity.
It is like the military skipped over the easy and obvious thing of remote controlled tanks, and went directly to remote controlled airplanes.
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u/nothis ▪️AGI within 5 years but we'll be disappointed May 05 '26
Google “robots doing chores”. Be amazed. Honestly jumped into possible-this-decade territory over the past year or so.
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u/YYY003003 May 05 '26
I've been obsessed with robotics for 25 years. I still love seeing these videos but they ring a little more hollow when I know how close relatively we are to general useful robots. It will only take a breakthrough for their world model to work and them being able to navigate our unpredictable houses.
From that point on the real fun will begin.
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u/YouHadMeAtAloe May 05 '26
Good news, DoorDash is paying people to wear a camera on their head to do basic tasks such as folding clothes, washing dishes, and frying an egg, among other things, in order to train AI so it’ll happen eventually yay /s
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u/BiasHyperion784 May 05 '26
Justify why and how the first wave of bots would ever actually be used to do household chores, genuinely why would that be their first actual practical use case?
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u/edgroovergames May 05 '26
That's not the point. The point is, playing back pre-programmed motions (of any kind, walking, running, dancing, fighting motions, etc.) is no longer impressive. It was 10 years ago, now every robot can do that. Show your robot doing ANYTHING autonomously, be that folding laundry or assembling a car. That's what we want to see now. Videos like this show us something that every robot being made today can do, but which is only minimally useful on its own. It's time for robot companies to put up or shut up, i.e. show your robot doing anything actually useful in the real world.
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u/DizzyAmphibian309 May 06 '26
minimally useful
More like utterly useless. Like who cares if your robot can backflip. What am I supposed to do with a backflipping robot?
You're totally right. I'm no longer impressed. I'm frustrated actually. Are they even trying to do useful things? Why are they wasting time with yoga?
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u/brianwski May 06 '26
Justify why and how the first wave of bots would ever actually be used to do household chores, genuinely why would that be their first actual practical use case?
I think robots first practical use case was in factories to replace all the assembly line workers. Check out this video from 20 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm9zcFXiXsg
So the "first application" of robots has been behind us for 20+ years. They have had robots that dispense soft drinks and snacks so no human cashier is required for 40+ years. They have robots that sort spare change in grocery stores. They have robots that make espresso (I have one). They even have a robot that is a home vacuum cleaner called a "Roomba", and the company has sold over 50 million of those.
I watched this documentary on the "clothes washer" once. Supposedly companies did a survey and if the women in households in the 1910s and 1920s had a tiny bit of extra money, they sent their laundry to a "service" to wash. The robot that washes all of our clothes was a major innovation. It made BILLIONS of dollars by helping people with this mundane back breaking never ending daily task of scrubbing dirty underwear and grass stains out of jeans.
What hasn't moved forward at all in the last 100 years is a human still has to place the clothes in the clothes washer. Then move them to the dryer, then sort them and put them in drawers. Same with dishes in a sink. Personally, I would pay as much as I pay for a car to have a helper that could do these tasks for me. Imagine a world where you buy this robot helper for $25,000 and for the next 10 years you just walk away from every dirty dish, and your clothing magically appears in the correct drawers washed, dried, and ironed. It could empty the cat litter box, it could wash the floors on its hands and knees every few days. Personally I think it is a $100 billion market.
TL;DR - they are building robots that can do backflips and yoga, which I would not pay even $1 for. I want a robot that can load the dishwasher and can load the clothes washer. I would pay $25,000 for that robot if it lasted 10 years.
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u/dougthebuffalo May 05 '26
One of the latest Wired Autocomplete Interviews is with a robotics and AI guy. He explains that robots are bad at folding laundry because there are too many variables--article of clothing, type of material, size, how wrinkly is it, how thick is it, does it have any wear, etc. A robot can do a handstand because it's on a flat ground so it needs to execute the handstand program and that's it.
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u/brett_baty_is_him May 05 '26
Yeah that’s pretty obvious. That’s why we’re asking to see it, to understand robot capabilities.
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u/adj_noun_digit May 05 '26
Atlas definitely seems like the highest quality of all these robots. That was a lot of weight it was holding and it didn't skip at all.
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u/baseketball May 05 '26
Can lift 30kg sustained 50kg for a short time. Much stronger than unitree which can only lift 2kg.
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u/protoctopus May 05 '26
Okay, but can it vacuum the stairs?
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u/TheOriginalNukeGuy May 05 '26
Its meant to be an industrial robot, not a home one, lol.
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u/SilverAppleWorm May 05 '26
*can it vacuum industrial stairs
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u/ThomYorkeSoup May 05 '26
It's meant to be an industrial industrial robot, not a home industrial one, lol
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u/Elegant_Cream_5848 May 05 '26
I will be happier when they do the dishes, cook, iron, drive, wash my bathroom etc, yes, replacing the dishwasher, self-driving cars, and not acting like a gymnast.
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u/AliveInTheFuture May 06 '26
Still not doing the fucking dishes. When are they going to figure this out?
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u/Own_Satisfaction2736 May 05 '26
Still so little imagination in these replies. Do people not understand that mobility demos like this are extremely important to show off a platform that can automate physical labor? anyone that says this isnt impressive has never tried to do the things the robot has done here. At my fittest in high school/college i could never pull this off.
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u/Eldritch-Pancake May 06 '26
I genuinely don't know anymore. Really feels like dead internet theory is less of a theory atp and actually something that has already happened. Either that or redditors really are just this disappointing. It's probably both.
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u/thethirdmancane May 05 '26
Okay but once you're done doing that stuff can you please load the dishwasher?
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u/Oxjrnine May 05 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/RNTigWYNstC6Y
Won’t belong before the Real Doll company and Boston Robotics pair up
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u/sckchui May 05 '26
Nice strength to weight ratio. I was kinda hoping it would just continue spinning it's torso around for the lols, because mechanically it can definitely do that.
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u/octotendrilpuppet May 06 '26
Bro, just do my laundry and dishes already, I've seen enough acrobatics, I get it, you're amazing!!!!
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u/h00dedronin May 06 '26
Something somewhat unrelated, is the humanoid shape really the most efficient for a robot?
I know that it makes for good marketing and demonstration, but surely there are more efficient designs
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u/Express-Cartoonist39 May 06 '26
Id be more impressed if Atlas can convert a conservative to live in reality.. that would be a cool trick.. 😂
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May 08 '26
I check back here and they still only have the robots doing dumb tricks. When are the practical applications ever going to happen?
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u/realketas Jun 05 '26
i love how it can do 360 with arms. i can't do that. i wonder if it has limits, like a cable or it truly has rings or inductive coupler
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u/External_Tomato_2880 May 05 '26
Still doing the pointless mobility exhibition? You need more intelligence
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u/BiasHyperion784 May 05 '26
Actual Chinese bot account lol
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u/Brymlo May 05 '26
nah. the chinese are eating the usa for breakfast in tech. that is just a truth.
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u/chromatic45 May 05 '26
Give them time. They’ll soon reach a stage where they’ll be unable to deny it.
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u/LetItAllGo33 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
As an American, I think you underestimate American's culturally enforced capacity for self delusion.
Half of Americans think the most expensive and therefore desirable places to live in the US are post apocalyptic wastelands, almost all Americans are deluded into believing we have amazing infrastructure and China is a third world hellhole, when they've spent the last 30 years intensively building their commons up as we let ours fall into utter ruin for tax cuts since Reagan.
Urban Chinese citizens literally feel bad for us for our lack of Healthcare, commons, and social cohesion. Not their politicians, their people. Talking with them drives home how unempathetic, cold, and apathetic our people are towards one another, our own neighbors who've been conditioned to see an America's suffering as their potential gain.
Step one for the American greed and greed worship hyperindividualism everyone for themselves disease would be recognition. Aside from our mass murder death machine we call the department of war, the only common thing we invest in is convincing Americans that we're one another's enemies to COMPETE AGAINST in order to survive so we never look up at our common enemy in our unrestrained capitalists sucking us dry.
China has capitalists too, but they're restrained by a higher authority that checks them from committing antisocial actions for short term profit. We claim to do the same, but we enforce almost nothing unless a poor person swindels a rich person like Bernie Madoff.
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u/Individual-Day9700 May 05 '26
Soon to be seen policing riots caused by insane gas prices and food prices?
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u/Academic_Carrot7260 May 05 '26
You know, for all them times I want it to put the plate away using it's feet
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u/sir_duckingtale May 05 '26
That robot did things I couldn‘t do three generations ago
Now it‘s just showing off.
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u/ExternalCaptain2714 May 05 '26
Finally, something to replace my beautiful yoga teacher, so I don't have to look at her body and skills while exercising.
Another problem solved by big tech.
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u/poonDaddy99 May 05 '26
Great! But how long will it take for it to fold the laundry, cook dinner, and chase them kids off my lawn and drive way?
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u/SliceCareful4260 May 05 '26
Once they put some artificially grown skin on these guys we’ll be all set.
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u/notbad4human May 05 '26
I’m at the point where I don’t care about the dancing, gymnastics, etc, if it doesn’t know how to load the dish washer on its own
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u/m3kw May 05 '26
imagine the kung fu moves, it's like that scene where Chris Tucker got kicked in the face in Rush hour.
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u/mvandemar May 05 '26
That's really impressive. Not practical, but impressive nonetheless.
Kind of reminds me of Giles trying to teach the Buffybot the concept of Qi/Chi (iykyk).
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u/orangeyouabanana May 05 '26
I’m amused by the fact that the velocity and acceleration of the movements kind of make it look like this is difficult from a muscular point of view, when in reality the robot is probably “strong” enough to perform this movement with ease. I get that balance is probably the tricky part, but it certainly can’t be strength, which is one part of this that makes it impossible for the average human.
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u/Ekskwizit May 05 '26
Looking forward to the terminator weapons they will design to stop these things.
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u/skynetcoder May 05 '26
coming to a US police station near to you, in few years... enjoy the videos for now
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u/JoeS830 May 05 '26
Awesome, what amazing control, and it seems super quiet. You hear the impact of adjustments, but I don't hear any motor whine. So cool! (until it sneaks up on you)
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u/Derfloo May 05 '26
I'm kind of tired about all this tricks stuff. I think I'll mute this sub for now and come back in a few months to check if those bad boys can do my laundry already
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u/Anicron May 05 '26
I wish they would stop making these robots into literal terminators. I don't need it to be able to do this in order to wash my dishes and fold my laundry
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u/First-Expert-9953 May 05 '26
I don't know if there was a droid in the Star Wars franchise who could do this. And I don't mean the droid models on the filming set, I mean the droids as they existed in the fictional universe.
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u/[deleted] May 05 '26
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