Boston Dynamics taught its robots parkour: what's the point and how Atlas evolved
Engineers at Boston Dynamics trained the Atlas robot to maneuver on complex parkour courses, developing new movements inspired by human behavior and pushing the humanoid robot to the limits of its capabilities. In the end, both Atlas robots passed the full obstacle course almost flawlessly.
Among the robots' complex movements is a backflip. All elements were captured on camera, so the engineers' efforts became known worldwide. But there is no limit to perfection, as the scientists believe. After the final backflip, one of the robots was supposed to wave its arm like a major league pitcher after the last out of a game. But during this movement, Atlas stumbled slightly.
Scott Kuindersma, head of the Atlas program at Boston Dynamics, said: "We had never had this behavior after a backflip until today, so it was a real experiment. If you watch the video closely, it looks a bit awkward. We are going to change the behavior, which we had already tested before, to have some confidence that it will work."
After watching the video, a question arises: "Why parkour?" Indeed, what is the point of robots running through an obstacle course?
Building the foundation
The ability to do a backflip may never be useful in commercial settings. However, if robots eventually can react to their environment with the same agility as an average adult, the range of potential applications will be practically limitless.
“Humanoids are interesting from several points of view. First, they reflect our vision of the robot of the future, which can work anywhere and do anything. <…> From a technical standpoint, humanoids present several challenges that we welcome as a research group. The combination of their size and complexity creates hardware design trade-offs related to the strength-to-weight ratio, operating time, range of motion and physical reliability. <…> Ultimately, expanding the capabilities of a humanoid robot like Atlas leads to innovations in hardware and software that are applied to all of our robots at Boston Dynamics”
As specific and narrow as parkour may seem as a discipline, it gives the Atlas team an "ideal sandbox" for experimenting with new behavior. It is a full-body activity that requires the robot to maintain balance in various situations and smoothly switch between movements.
Evolution of Atlas
If you look at old videos of the Atlas robot, it is easy to overlook how much progress the team has made over this time. Some improvements are unnoticeable to an ordinary viewer, but they represent a giant leap in technology.
For example, the company filmed dance videos with the robots to show their ability to create diverse dynamic movements and combine them into a specific sequence that could be repeated. However, in those cases the robot did not sense and did not respond in any way to its environment.
In the case of parkour, the robot adapts its behavior based on what it sees. This means engineers do not need to pre-program jumping movements for every possible platform and gap the robot may encounter. Instead, the team creates fewer behavior templates that can be matched to the environment.
Simulation is an important development tool for the Atlas group, both for evaluating new behavior before testing robots and for ensuring that new software changes do not negatively affect existing capabilities.
Kuindersma notes: "If you and I jumped over a barrier, we would use certain properties of our bodies that are hard to transfer to a robot. For example, a robot has no spine or shoulder blades, so its range of motion is different from ours. The robot also has a heavy torso and relatively weak arm joints. Expanding our tools to find solutions that work within these constraints is what made jumping an interesting challenge."
Joys and frustrations
During filming, Atlas reached the jump moment in about half of the attempts. In other cases, the robot cleared the barrier but lost its balance and fell backward. According to the researchers, any new behavior has a small chance of failing. Boston Dynamics' parkour is almost 60 seconds of continuous jumping, jogging and turning, so failures can happen.
Boston Dynamics filmed two robots performing parkour together for the first time. The film crew enjoyed Atlas's performance. When the robots reached the final movements, the engineers could barely hold back their applause until the cameras were turned off.
According to Scott Kuindersma, one of the joys of robotics is the opportunity to solve truly important problems, but at the same time it brings inevitable frustrations.
"I find it hard to imagine a world 20 years from now without capable mobile robots that move with grace and reliability and work alongside people to enrich our lives. But we are still at the beginning of building that future. I hope demonstrations like these give a small glimpse of what is possible," the engineer said.
