A new video released by Boston Dynamics this week captures the moment two of its Atlas humanoid robots successfully manoeuvre through a complex parkour course, demonstrating their whole-body athletics while maintaining balance through a variety of rapidly changing, high-energy activities.
In the video, which can be viewed above, the first of the two robots can be seen running up a series of banked plywood panels, broad jumping a gap, and running up and down stairs in a course set up on the second floor of Boston Dynamics’ headquarters.
The second robot can be seen leaping onto a balance beam and following the same steps in reverse, while the first robot vaults over the beam. Both land two perfectly synchronised backflips.
Boston Dynamics said “parkour is the perfect sandbox for the Atlas team to experiment with new behaviours. Through jumps, balance beams, and vaults, we demonstrate how we push Atlas to its limits to discover the next generation of mobility, perception, and athletic intelligence”.
In another video released by Boston Dynamics, which can be viewed below, Atlas only gets the vault right about half of the time. On other runs, Atlas can be seen making it over the barrier before losing its balance and falling backward. Engineers can then be seen looking to logs to see if they can find opportunities for on-the-fly adjustments.
“There are a lot of pretty exciting behaviours here, and some of them are not totally reliable yet,” said Ben Stephens, the Atlas controls lead. “Every behaviour here has a small chance of failure. It’s almost 90 seconds of continuous jumping, jogging, turning, vaulting, and flipping, so those probabilities add up.”
Stephens added that this was the first time Boston Dynamics has filmed two robots performing parkour together. “We had never actually done the two robots together until two weeks ago,” he said on the day the routine was filmed. “We’re in a place now where it should work. We think we’ve caught all of the major failures, and now it’s just down to those small probabilities.”
“I think that’s one of the joys of robotics, that we’re solving really hard problems, and with that comes the inevitable frustrations along the way,” added Scott Kuindersma, Atlas team lead at Boston Dynamics. “I find it hard to imagine a world 20 years from now where there aren’t capable mobile robots that move with grace, reliability, and work alongside humans to enrich our lives. But we’re still in the early days of creating that future. I hope that demonstrations like this provide a small glimpse of what’s possible.”
