Robot balancing

[william howell]

This was the last thing we filmed on our DSMC1 cameras (2 dragons and a Scarlet) before recently switching to DSMC2. We wanted no fancy editing, just simple cuts to clearly show that no movie trickery was involved.

 

[Michael Hastings]

So do you go with a human style to make it more human or is it that the human form is a well tested configuration for bipedal walking?

 

[william howell]

So do you go with a human style to make it more human or is it that the human form is a well tested configuration for bipedal walking?

Hey Michael, I hope all is well in south Florida. I'm driving down there on Thursday to 3d map some reefs in key largo. In any case, we live in a human centered world. Wheeled and track robots only have access to a limited range of environments, and that lack of mobility is why we have always been interested in humanoid robots.



Our work with Atlas (Boston Dynamics robot) stems from our participation in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). The DRC was a direct response to the Fukishima disaster in 2011, and as such was a 4 year global initiative to bring humanoid robots into the realm of usability... specifically to hand the engineers in charge of clean up a tool that they could use in the effort. We're a long way from that day, but.. I've been documenting our journey from the beginning..

There were three stages to the competition: The Virtual Robotics Challenge (which we won), the DARPA Robotics Trials (which we placed second, but the first place team was purchased by Google and dropped out of the competition... making us the winners of the second stage), and the third stage the DARPA Robotics Finals held on June 5-6 2015 in which we placed second (with a broken robot).. It was a wild ride filled with all sorts of craziness like Larry Page and Elon Musk chilling with us in our garage, making the cover of Time, and being smack dab in the center of a global media storm...

The work it's take to make a humanoid robot balance like this is literally absurd. Our whole body controller has over 2 million lines of code, is now open source to the world, and running on a large percentage of humanoid robots.


Here's a mini-doc I cut in 2013 after the second stage (The DARPA Robotics Trials) Shot on Sony Fs700/Fs100/Canon5d's:

Here's the "preview" video I made of our documentary, in order to announce to the field that we were ready for the competition in June 2015 (shot on Sony Fs700/Fs100):