Another Boston Dynamics robot video
This video showcases smaller robots that are distinctly less frightening that their earlier design.
I truly do question the usefulness of this robot in the house. However, its ability to maneuver and do some quite complicated tasks makes me immediately think this should be a rover we send to the Moon, Mars, Europa, and beyond.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
This video showcases smaller robots that are distinctly less frightening that their earlier design.
I truly do question the usefulness of this robot in the house. However, its ability to maneuver and do some quite complicated tasks makes me immediately think this should be a rover we send to the Moon, Mars, Europa, and beyond.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Eventually these will be in the house providing senior care for us old folks.
And probably in the not too distant future.
Actually I am counting on it.
Mr. Zimmerman: Robots of this agility needs autonomous self-guiding and self-control at Mars, which would be a technology revolution/jump for Mars missions. Just opposite to present rover approach with preset path and an average “speed” of 0.1 mm/s. It would a good idea to test it at first at Moon surface.
In Sweden, all politicians and journalists say that the young men from the Middle East, who never had a job or schooling other than maybe military conscription that treated them very badly, will take care of the elderly. Actually, the huge and uncontrolled immigration of anonymous islamic men is necessary, or else the elderly would all be left to die, they say. In Sweden, the elderly are institutionalized and staff decides what and when they eat, see to it that they never drink alcohol or smoke et cetera. They voted for and paid tax for this all their lives, they thought that institutionalization would be better than freedom. Swedes are very stupid and extremely easy to enslave with even the stupidest propaganda and most obvious lies.
I’d certainly prefer the robots!
Dammit. It needs two necks/heads and ONE rear leg. :-)
Look at all the damages to the walls. stairs and door frames! It does bump into a furniture at 0:35 and (almost?) into a door frame ten seconds later. It’s obviously not consumer ready yet.
LocaFluff: Which process or events turned your brave, feared and pride Vikings into such stupid leftist slaves, which hate themselves and surrender to Islam?
@Alex
Christianity did! Let yourself be beaten. Forgive your enemies who are torturing you to death, just let them go on. Love not your children or what is good, love only those who hate you. Suffering and dying is the only goal in life. But it must be meaningless! If you let yourself be killed in order to, for example, save your child’s life, then you are a profit seeking investor and thereby a sinner and will burn in Hell always. You must make sure that you are tortured to death meaninglessly.
That is Jesus’ message, look it up yourself in the Book if you don’t believe me. And Sweden is the by far most Christian country in the world now, because we’ve been geographically isolated since always. Others have been as Christian, but for obvious reasons they have all quickly been totally exterminated.
Muslims have no concept of sins or forgiveness, so having them torture you to death is perfectly meaningless since it is destructive even to Christianity. No one can blame you for acting in self interest when you not only have yourself, your children and your society destroyed meaninglessly, but also having the very reason for this being destroys. It makes no sense, and that is the core of what Christianity is.
Christianity might work in a society where everyone follows this code. But then every deviant must promptly be executed. Which is the compromise often applied by Christian societies who have corrupted them with the sinful will to live. Christianity is a sect for self-hating monks in a closed monastery. When applied to a society Christianity is genocide with death as its only achievement.
Weakness and failure are the ideals. Amen.
But I can understand the Christianing of Sweden. The Vikings were very brutal. Graves show that when one free man died, his servants were murdered and burried with him. There are graves where the face of men have been carved off and replaced by other mens’ faces. They used to rearrange the cut of limbs of the animals burried. And graves are sometimes strewn by fingers and toes from others than those burried. A funeral was a slaughter. I can understand that there was popular demand for a change. But in the long run Christianity in its defenselessness leads to the same outcome anyway.
Mike Borgelt: Heh. Very good. Very good indeed.
LocalFluff:
That is an especially interesting and destructively literal transmogrification of Christianity that the Swedes have accomplished. While I am not a religious person, I do subscribe as a general rule to the Judeo / Christian ethic, but have no desire to turn my life upside down in such a hopeless and dark way.
Maybe its the lack of sunshine during the winter? A lack of vitamin D expressed as depression and suicidal tendencies? The Viking DNA / genes sooo disappointed and offended in the choices of the humans that they brought forth into the world that they think it best to just exterminate them then allow them to continue their offence to nature?
And PS:
The Swedes are judged to be the best looking people on the planet, bar none. Both men and women. What irony.
Maybe this robot is the solution to the Swedish need for self destruction and the solution to their 3 day work week goal?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/swedish-six-hour-workday-trial-runs-into-trouble-too-expensive
Why do Leftists disdain work so? Work is fulfilling, work is worthwhile, work is essential for the human being to both fulfill the essential needs of life and to feel accomplished and to make progress. Do their systems become sooo wrote and monotonous that they come to think that work is a bad thing? This was also Nancy Pelosi’s logic in forcing Obamacare on the American public, to enable the people to become “artists and writers” I believe was her mantra.
What in the end they are selling is in reality dependency. We can not have enough dependency, for within dependency the “highly educated” elites can install their informed interpretation of how the people should live.
The political dependency thinking may become trumped by Trump.
LocalFluff and Contour: This short video sequence maybe of interest for our (here Danish) Vikings versus Christianity (represented by Alfred the Great, whose Saxion forefathers also praid to Odin) discussion!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUrf0Z06roE&list=PLz1jMDcgzSIHCr_d-u60-SQ4k5J8jlhWX
LocalFluff: I agree with your comment above in principle!
Swedes are among the least literal Christian peoples in the Western world. Hardly anyone can name an angel or a saint. Most have never been in a church. But the destructive core message of Jesus is totally dominant in all societal life. That’s why Trump is such a total shock in Sweden. He says he’ll win, that’s the most horrible thing one can imagine! We must always only do that which is worst for ourselves. That all politicians and all journalists and actually all voters repeat. So we elect the worst of the worst to be our leaders. No party leader and no minister has any education or ever had a job and none of them ever accomplished anything of any kind, politically or otherwise. (I’m not kidding!) For 20 years nothing has been reformed. A failed healthcare reform like Obamacare would be welcomed as a sign of life from our apathetic “leaders”. We have picked the losing team because failure is our ideal and sole purpose.
LocalFluff: Your report makes me speechless. There is a general degradation process in so-called liberal Western societies, which are weak, feminized, self-hurting and guilt-obsessed. Is there a rescue?
BTW, what you think about the relation between left ideology and Christianity? At first it looks as both were just antagonism, but it seems to me that leftist ideology has a significant heritage in (degraded) Christianity. What do you think?
The walls are scuffed because the structure is an pre-existing and ongoing test bed. The previous ‘spot’ was also tested there-in, before the manipulator arm was attached. I don’t believe this robot is as far along as you may think; the actions in the kitchen were obviously pre-programmed. I notice no optics in the manipulator hand, either.
These units, with modifications could be very useful for surface exploration. The limiting factor I see is battery life. How long can they run on a full charge? Would a RTG battery be powerful enough to drive the thing? Can you get a decent science kit on board? This is some research that could pay off handsomely in the future.
Alex wrote: “Robots of this agility … at Mars, which would be a technology revolution/jump for Mars missions. Just opposite to present rover approach with preset path and an average “speed” of 0.1 mm/s.”
We should not confuse the average speed with mission success. This is not a race, it is exploration. The exploration progress may appear to be slow, but this is because so much time is spent at each location. Curiosity’s top speed is already 90 meters per hour (25 mm/s), but the mission plan only allows for travel of up to 200 meters per day, which is performed autonomously.
A majority of the time is spent on location either performing experiments and taking photographs or else waiting for further instructions.
Since Curiosity is already autonomous, the 200 meter limit in daily travel is not due to a lack of self navigational ability. It is probably due to the limit on JPL’s confidence of the terrain at the daily destination to which they direct the rover. Another possibility is that they want to view the terrain every 200 meters just to make sure they are not driving past anything interesting.
In the meantime, the hazard associated with one of these four legged rovers (there’s probably a pun, here, if only I could see it) tipping over may be more than the cameras and other instrumentation may be able to tolerate. The damage could be unrecoverable for any or all of the important instruments. Although there may be few bananas on Mars, there is sand, which could give poor traction and could upset stability, and there may be large rocks and canyon walls, which the end of the video shows can be a tipping hazard. Greater width of the rover than is shown in this video would help with tipping and may allow for fitting a decent science kit on board (although, Joe, there is the question of power and energy storage).
Also, we have already experienced problems with failing wheels on our rovers, so we need to consider the possibility that a leg may also fail. The resulting hopping motion may be hard on the instruments. I would recommend a six legged rover to anyone considering this type of mobility system for such remote use.
A Mars or lunar rover would need to be robust. Reliability and longevity are required for the missions we are doing, these days. This style of mobility system would need a lot of testing and operational experience.
I see a lot of advantages, if they are ever employed, because like the stairway demonstration, they could conceivably climb up rocks that our wheeled rovers cannot, adding new possible locations for exploration. We got a nice look at the balanced rock at Murray Buttes ( http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/balanced-rock-at-last/ ), but wouldn’t it have been nicer if we could have climbed up to the rock and compared it with its surroundings?
Edward:
Thank you for your comment. It is my fault, my not exact phrasing of my comment. I should have used to word “self-deciding instead of self-guiding or navigation. Advanced robots have to decide itself in intelligent way, which next step and activity shall follow, only based some rough mission rules. This requirement have to apply specifically if the robots are getting very fast and agile and have decide just in time to avoid hazards, which prevents active control from Earth due signal transfer time. We are talking about a kind of AI.
BTW, legs are vastly superior to wheels in such environment as Mars, Moon or even (natural kept) Earth. Mother Nature displays every day. However, there are better legged robots designs for this purpose (already developed by Boston Dynamics) as shown in the video.