Atlas

 

Atlas:

The world’s most dynamic humanoid robot, Atlas is a research platform designed to push the limits of whole-body mobility. Atlas’s advanced control system and state-of-the-art hardware give the robot the power and balance to demonstrate human-level agility.

Atlas is designed to operate both outdoors and inside buildings and has whole-body dynamic balancing. Atlas is able to sense obstacles and negotiate rough terrain autonomously or via teleoperation. The robot is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated.

Many humanoid applications can be decomposed into a two stage control problem: a behaviour level controller that outputs high level commands and a low level controller that is responsible for generating joint commands. In order to fully utilize the workspace and be robust to external perturbations, the low level controller has to take full body kinematics and dynamics into consideration. 

• At 5’9” (1.75 m) and 180 lbs (82 kg), the new ATLAS is much shorter and lighter than the previous model, which was 6’2” (1.9 m) and 345 lbs (156 kg). See family photo above for comparison.

• It looks like BD decided that electric motors aren’t yet up to the task of getting a 180-pound robot to walk around, so they stuck with the more complicated (and generally messier) hydraulic system. Other legged robots do this too, and it seems like a reasonable compromise between the quiet efficiency of electricity and the power of hydraulics.

• That dynamic balancing reminds us a lot of the early BigDog videos, but it’s crazy to see it running in a biped like this, because of the speed at which the limbs have to move while still supporting the upper body.

• We’re not exactly sure how much autonomy it’s got going at this point. While walking outdoors, the LIDAR appears not to be spinning much of the time, which means someone is likely driving the robot. Some of the box lifting looks to be autonomous, but we’re definitely looking for some background on what’s going on behind the scenes when the robot is stacking boxes on those shelves.

• It can fall over, and not only not die, but get up again by itself. There were a few layers of mats underneath the robot, and one video doesn’t reveal a whole lot about its overall robustness, but this is miles better than any other humanoid robot short of CHIMP (if you want to call CHIMP a humanoid).