Remember ATLAS? The bipedal robot from Boston Dynamics that exhibited incredible bipedal mobility? Well, it has learned new skills since. In addition to picking up things, resisting push over, and getting back up when it happens to fall over, it now adds the ability to jump on to boxes of variety of heights, jumping from box-to-box and even pull of a back flip. Yup. Back flip. A somewhat common stun that some humans (namely, myself) can’t even pull off. And in case you are wondering, ATLAS did the latter with better balance than some humans and it pulled it off completely untethered. Needless to say, it is no doubt an exciting development, but it is also eery at the same time.
Why eery? Because, ATLAS is becoming more and more human-like and you know what that means. It means, some time down the road, it may indeed replace humans for some jobs that we once thought only humans with functioning limbs can do. Given the advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning, who knows one day a robot like ATLAS could knocking on our doors to drop packages? For all you know, it may eventually learn how to drive like the gun-shooting space robot from Russia. The fictional foretelling of robots taking over the world may be very well be true. Continue reading to catch ATLAS pulling the basic parkour moves in the video below.
Image: Boston Dynamics/YouTube.
