I may be ignorant, but from my experience Boston Dynamics is cool and if they were able to sell these things to the AI guys good for them!
I know these robots are used to do maintenance vhecks on big factories, where a dude can tell it to walk to a valve to look at it through a camera, and i think thats fine.
Instead of having 50 cameras you have one walking one.
It’s kinda funny how these dogs went from cute and interesting robot developments to tools of the military industrial complex. The people who designed these are disgusting and depraved.
Not really. The people who designed these are nerds like us that want to push the boundaries of science. If they don’t do it someone else will.
The people that choose what to apply them too are the ones with poor morals. You could build these things and only sell them to places that use them for monitoring things like they do in dangerous factories these days.
Probably get about two or three lbs of copper out of the motors alone. Still not worth the gas unless you’re going to fill up the back of your truck with em though.
do these do any image analysis? what happens when you hold a mirror to them lol
They feel shame and embarrassment like the rest of us.
I wonder how far one of these would fly if it wandered onto a road and got hammered by a semi doing 55mph.
Would be funny to hear about a kid with a slingshot or something taking these out.
Gonna need something more than a slingshot.
Maybe a laser to their lidar eyes will do the trick.
Black Mirror, here we come.
People with good intentions should not hesitate to blast a robot. Just sayin’.
One step closer to a Horizon Zero Dawn future. Just let me live long enough to see the dinobots.
So steal the robot dogs?
Now we just need a robot steak
I’m sure some hackers could figure out the wireless communications and hijack…
Or a big ass anti static bag and a few doods with masks. As far as easy to steal $100K+ items go these seem kinda like a great target.
So a robot you can kick over is better than dogs with actual teeth? Its a good thing tech bros are dumb as fuck.
Well you can’t attach a machine gun to a dog with teeth. I mean you can, but it won’t hit anything.
I mean, it might. Fire enough bullets wherever the dog is looking and it’ll be bound to hit something.
guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers
The country, ah yes the only place that exists on the internet, the almighty one powerful country to rule them all. THE. COUNTRY.
Fortune is an American publication…
I didn’t write a comment on Fortune’s website, I wrote a comment to a post in Lemmy. https://lemmy.world/c/technology is a community in Lemmy.World, an instance for the entire world to use.
It’s a literal copy paste of the article title. This is such a strange thing to get upset about.
I couldn’t help but read this in David Mitchell’s voice.
I take that as a compliment, thanks.
He really does have a rare gift for peevishness.
the coolest thing about these dogs? you can break them with a directional wireless jamming device.
also known as a .308 Winchester.
Why quadruped instead of wheels? Just seems gimmicky to me.
Legs have some advantages over wheels, but unless these can climb or jump it seems to be the lesser choice. If it can climb or jump, then I’ll stfu.
Stairs. Also, pretty sure these can jump.
Because wheels aren’t all that great in less than carefully managed paths. Quadrupedal motion is just fine in most all situations… Wheels are most efficient, followed by swimming with boyancy, then flying with the wind, then bipedal motion… But quadrupedal motion isn’t everywhere for no reason. It’s very stable and robust. It’s very practical and forgiving in most all situations
Quadrupedal motion is pervasive in nature because wheels (and tank treads for bad terrain) can’t readily form via natural processes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_systems#Biological_barriers_to_wheeled_organisms
Also this goes back to my note about climbing and jumping. Those would give limbs a real advantage in applications where it is relevant.
I mean, sure, wheels would require an essentially impossible evolutionary path, but they’re still very dependent on terrain
Some goats can climb grades no wheel could touch. Wheels have issues with long grasses and roots, don’t work great if they don’t have good contact with the terrain, aren’t good for climbing or ledges, and fast to wear in dirty environments
You can specialize to overcome these challenges, but they’re less general purpose. Wheels that would let you travel over uneven terrain need to be big and/or very complex
Wheels work really, really well on suitable surfaces, but they’re specialist technology. Quadrepeds are very stable and control their weight distribution much better
From an engineering standpoint, you’d be better off putting the robot dogs on skateboards or in a wheeled carrier then making the kind of high-torque wheels that can lock to work like feet when needed - that’s what we use when designing wheels for the kinds of travel these dogs were designed for
Wheels are obviously incredibly useful tech, but they’re not the ideal solution for every problem
Tracks are the “wheels” solution to bad terrain, which also includes soft surfaces (e.g. snow, mud). Even an excavator can climb ~35 degrees, and a lighter less top-heavy tracked vehicle should be able to do a bit better. Compared to legs, tracked vehicles are faster, more efficient, and more durable.
Goats are exceptional climbers, but animals use legs as part of a full-body motion. Slapping legs onto a box isn’t the same as putting legs on a torso that also bends, twists, and flexes.
I mean I guess it’s part of the iterative process of improving quadruped robots, but at this stage of development it still seems gimmicky.
You can watch some videos on YouTube, if you really want to learn. It’s interesting, sometimes in a full-dystopian nightmare fuel kind of way. Yes, we are at the point where some of these robots can climb and jump.
It’s a gimmick, though, for sure. Just like human-mimicking androids are a gimmick. The money for robotics is in manufacturing.
But I’ll bet there will always be an obscenely wealthy person who is willing to pay for a cool looking robot prototype.
I think it’s for rough terrain, like carrying packs of supplies through war zones. So not full climbing but at least able to step over rocks and debris.
Intimidation factor.
Also higher up for the turret
You can always try to pull the battery. If that doesn’t work maybe a taser to short it out.
https://mashable.com/article/how-to-shut-down-boston-dynamics-robot-dog-spot
