This week Boston Dynamics retired its well-known Atlas robotic that was powered by hydraulics. Then today it unveiled its new Atlas robot, which is powered by electricity.
The change won’t look like a lot, however TechCrunch’s Brian Heater informed the TechCrunch Minute that the now-deprecated hydraulics system was old-fashioned. It’s not onerous to identify why Boston Dynamics, owned by Hyundai, wished to go electrical. Its new Atlas robotic is leaner, and seems to have improved range-of-motion. Measurement and skill to contort and maneuver aren’t beauty parts to a humanoid robotic — they will unlock new use instances and doable work environments.
The brand new Atlas is just not extremely well-defined right now, which isn’t an enormous shock provided that it’s nonetheless a piece in progress. Nonetheless, we do know that it’s going to first head to Hyundai factories earlier than hitting the market extra typically down the highway.
Fortunately for these of us who need a home robotic to deal with family chores and maintain our fingers while we cry, there are different startups engaged on the humanoid robotic venture. Figure, Agility, Tesla… there are too many firms vying for a similar prize to notice on this brief publish. Which has me extremely excited — extra individuals engaged on the issue means faster progress, and hopefully sooner completion of a general-purpose humanoid robotic that may be taught.
On that final bit, it’s value holding in thoughts that AI is about to play a big position in how robots go from being nice at set, repetitive duties to having the ability to be taught, and do an amazing deal extra with out direct programming. Whereas it’s going to take time for LLMs’ capacity to ingest language, write code and the like to hook up with robots beneath growth right now, you’ll be able to spot the long run for those who squint far sufficient into the gap. To which all I can say is, sooner, please!
