The savvy entrepreneurs at Boston Dynamics produced two main robotics information cycles final week. The bigger of the 2 was, naturally, the electric Atlas announcement. As I write this, the sub-40 second video is steadily approaching 5 million views. A day prior, the corporate tugged on the group’s coronary heart strings when it introduced that the unique hydraulic Atlas was being put out to pasture, a decade after its introduction.
The accompanying video was a celebration of the older Atlas’ journey from DARPA analysis challenge to an impressively nimble bipedal ’bot. A minute in, nonetheless, the tone shifts. Finally, “Farewell to Atlas” is as a lot a celebration as it’s a blooper reel. It’s a welcome reminder that for each time the robotic sticks the touchdown on video there are dozens of slips, falls and sputters.
Picture Credit: Boston Dynamics
I’ve lengthy championed this type of transparency. It’s the type of factor I want to see extra from the robotics world. Merely showcasing the spotlight reel does a disservice to the hassle that went into getting these photographs. In lots of instances, we’re speaking years of trial and error spent getting robots to look good on digicam. While you solely share the optimistic outcomes, you’re setting unrealistic expectations. Bipedal robots fall over. In that respect, no less than, they’re identical to us. As Agility put it recently, “Everyone falls sometimes, it’s how we get back up that defines us.” I’d take {that a} step additional, including that studying the right way to fall nicely is equally necessary.
The corporate’s newly appointed CTO, Pras Velagapudi, not too long ago advised me that seeing robots fall on the job at this stage is definitely factor. “When a robot is actually out in the world doing real things, unexpected things are going to happen,” he notes. “You’re going to see some falls, but that’s part of learning to run a really long time in real-world environments. It’s expected, and it’s a sign that you’re not staging things.”
A fast scan of Harvard’s guidelines for falling without injury displays what we intuitively perceive about falling as people:
- Defend your head
- Use your weight to direct your fall
- Bend your knees
- Keep away from taking different individuals with you
As for robots, this IEEE Spectrum piece from last year is a good place to begin.
“We’re not afraid of a fall—we’re not treating the robots like they’re going to break all the time,” Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders advised the publication final yr. “Our robot falls a lot, and one of the things we decided a long time ago [is] that we needed to build robots that can fall without breaking. If you can go through that cycle of pushing your robot to failure, studying the failure, and fixing it, you can make progress to where it’s not falling. But if you build a machine or a control system or a culture around never falling, then you’ll never learn what you need to learn to make your robot not fall. We celebrate falls, even the falls that break the robot.”
Picture Credit: Boston Dynamics
The topic of falling additionally got here up after I spoke with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter forward of the electrical Atlas’ launch. Notably, the quick video begins with the robotic in a susceptible place. The best way the robotic’s legs arc round is sort of novel, permitting the system to face up from a very flat place. At first look, it virtually feels as if the corporate is displaying off, utilizing the flashy transfer merely as a technique to showcase the extraordinarily strong custom-built actuators.
“There will be very practical uses for that,” Playter advised me. “Robots are going to fall. You’d better be able to get up from prone.” He provides that the flexibility to stand up from a susceptible place can also be helpful for charging functions.
A lot of Boston Dynamics’ learnings round falling got here from Spot. Whereas there’s typically extra stability within the quadrupedal type issue (as evidenced from a long time making an attempt and failing to kick the robots over in movies), there are merely far more hours of Spot robots working in real-world situations.
Picture Credit: Agility Robotics
“Spot’s walking something like 70,000 kms a year on factory floors, doing about 100,000 inspections per month,” provides Playter. “They do fall, eventually. You have to be able to get back up. Hopefully you get your fall rate down — we have. I think we’re falling once every 100-200 kms. The fall rate has really gotten small, but it does happen.”
Playter provides that the corporate has an extended historical past of being “rough” on its robots. “They fall, and they’ve got to be able to survive. Fingers can’t fall off.”
Watching the above Atlas outtakes, it’s exhausting to not challenge a little bit of human empathy onto the ’bot. It actually does seem to fall like a human, drawing its extremities as near its physique as attainable, to guard them from additional damage.
When Agility added arms to Digit, again in 2019, it mentioned the position they play in falling. “For us, arms are simultaneously a tool for moving through the world — think getting up after a fall, waving your arms for balance, or pushing open a door — while also being useful for manipulating or carrying objects,” co-founder Jonathan Hurst noted at the time.
I spoke a bit to Agility concerning the matter at Modex earlier this yr. Video of a Digit robotic falling over on a conference ground a yr prior had made the social media rounds. “With a 99% success rate over about 20 hours of live demos, Digit still took a couple of falls at ProMat,” Agility famous on the time. “We have no proof, but we think our sales team orchestrated it so they could talk about Digits quick-change limbs and durability.”
As with the Atlas video, the corporate advised me that one thing akin to a fetal place is helpful by way of defending the robotic’s legs and arms.
The corporate has been utilizing reinforcement studying to assist fallen robots proper themselves. Agility shut off Digit’s impediment avoidance for the above video to pressure a fall. Within the video, the robotic makes use of its arms to mitigate the autumn as a lot as attainable. It then makes use of its reinforcement learnings to return to a well-known place from which it’s able to standing once more with a robotic pushup.
One in all humanoid robots’ major promoting factors is their capability to fit into present workflows — these factories and warehouses are referred to as “brownfield,” which means they weren’t {custom} constructed for automation. In lots of present instances of manufacturing unit automation, errors imply the system successfully shuts down till a human intervenes.
“Rescuing a humanoid robot is not going to be trivial,” says Playter, noting that these methods are heavy and may be tough to manually proper. “How are you going to do that if it can’t get itself off the ground?”
If these methods are actually going to make sure uninterrupted automation, they’ll have to fall nicely and get proper again up once more.
“Every time Digit falls, we learn something new,” provides Velagapudi. “When it comes to bipedal robotics, falling is a wonderful teacher.”
