The way it stands up…
Uncanny Valley
Boston Dynamics has announced its latest bipedal creation, the successor of the company’s jogging, flipping, dancing, and parkouring Atlas robot.
A video shared by the company shows the next-generation Atlas — built on an entirely new platform — waking from its slumber, slowly standing up by flipping its legs over and onto itself in an unnervingly inhuman fashion. Its face is the glowing end of a rough cylinder, seemingly designed for us humans to stare into its blacked-out abyss.
“This is not a render,” YouTuber Marques Brownlee remarked in a tweet, reacting to the video. “Oh my God.”
“It’s giving ‘call an ambulance… but not for me,'” he added, referring to a popular internet meme.
Atlas Shrugged
The company’s press release is pretty thin on details, speaking in general terms about how the new “fully electric Atlas robot” was designed from the ground up for “real-world applications” and has a “broader range of motion than any of our previous generations.”
It builds on its predecessor — formally dubbed HD Atlas — thanks to “new gripper variations to meet a diverse set of expected manipulation needs in customer environments.”
The humanoid robot market is really starting to heat up, with companies like Tesla and robotics company Figure announcing their own bipedal androids.
Figure, notably, recently signed a deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI after closing a whopping $675 million round of funding at a $2.6 billion valuation.
Late last year, the CEO of robot maker Agility Robotics Damion Shelton also announced that he’s looking to produce 10,000 humanoid robots inside a specially-built factory in the Pacific Northwest.
Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics has become the company to beat, drawing on extensive experience when it comes to biologically inspired bots. Its Spot robot dog has already been turned into a successful commercial product, making appearances at police raids, search-and-rescue missions, and even fashion shows.
It’s still unclear what Boston Dynamics is going after with its unnerving new Atlas robot. According to the press release, the company is aiming to “deliver a robot uniquely capable of tackling dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks in real applications.”
If there’s one thing the automaton has already achieved, though, it’s giving everybody the heebie-jeebies.
More on Atlas: Multiple OSHA Violations Identified in Video of Boston Dynamics Robot Assisting Construction Worker
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