This is a video of the Big Dog robot, a sort-of dog-like walking robot developed by Boston Dynamics (with a big chunk of funding from DARPA, the US military’s mad scientist division.) And it’s both amazing and really, really creepy.
It’s just uncannily alive looking. The bit where it stumbles on the ice, then recovers, is just so precisely like an animal (more a juvenile deer than a dog, our what-animal-does-that-robot-walk-like experts tell us) that you feel the future is finally here.
So take a good look at the movement of those legs - because that’s what’s going to be pursuing you across the smouldering rubble in a few decades time when the robot uprising takes place.
I think they did use models of animal movement for this robot. I initially thought a horse, but from what I read in comments many people think it looks more like a deer, and on second view, it does.
Nettie - 20 March 2008 02:30 AM
It’s pretty cool although the sound of that motor would drive me bonkers.
Crap.. Thought I’d posted about this a few weeks ago.. ahwell.
It’s a nifty thing, but don’t think it’s as noisy as all that. That’s a commercial-grade hydraulic compressor they’re using. They can get ahold of a *silent* one with the exact same specs, but it just costs about twenty times as much. DARPA grant or not, they have to save money someplace. If you watch the bits where the thing is on cables, you can hear how quiet it actually is.
It’s a nifty thing, but don’t think it’s as noisy as all that. That’s a commercial-grade hydraulic compressor they’re using. They can get ahold of a *silent* one with the exact same specs, but it just costs about twenty times as much. DARPA grant or not, they have to save money someplace. If you watch the bits where the thing is on cables, you can hear how quiet it actually is.
And they may have made it intentionally noisy for this video. That way when they send the real stealth robot army out to take over the world, nobody will ever suspect a thing until it is too late. . .
