Great. Now robots can dance better than I can…
That’s simply uncanny. There’s almost a stop-motion quality to their movements, like ED-209 from Robocop.
BTW, SpaceX has been seen using a Spot robot (named Zeus, and with a Snoopy-style doghouse to boot:
I agree! That was fantastic! 
5 million views and an AP article in under 48 hours… not bad, eh.
I’ve seen many YouTube videos of Boston Dynamics’ two-legged and four-legged robots being demonstrated but does anyone actually use them for real work?
You gotta own the dancefloor before you can be put to work, no?
I know this post is from ages ago - I am still catching up. But I think this is a key point that shows how job losses could affect, for example, game designers. How many people does it take to create all the forests, cities, and ruins in a game like Skyrim? What if instead of making all these models (with many tiny variants - an old tapestry damaged in one way, a very similar tapestry damaged in a different way…) and hand-placing them around the world, you could just have a handful of artists make some stock models and arrange them in sample scenes which you then give over to an AI who combines the samples created intentionally with reference photos of real places to create an entire 3d game world procedurally?
What if commoners you run into on the road don’t just have one of a few hundred pre-written lines that have to be written and voice acted, but is generated procedurally as well?
The potential is astounding.
Imagine us taking 3d printers to the ISS or a lunar base!
Alright, all caught up. Between this and the space thread, at least the times we live in are scientifically interesting too, not just politically.
The Boston Dynamics saga in three acts is now complete:
Human attacks robot
Robot develops scary new capabilities in search for justice
Robots celebrate after defeating human overlords
That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. Hard to believe that just a few short years ago Atlas could barely handle a few steps.
You do know that there is already a 3D printer on the ISS and multiple projects to develop additive manufacturing using available lunar materials (regolith)?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576518303874
I knew that was being worked on, I didn’t know if we had a working one up there yet or not.
They just posted this video featuring Spot with an arm:
Yeah, a few years ago they needed a wrench on the ISS, so the engineers on Earth designed one and sent the files to the station, where they 3d printed it.
You can download the STL file for that wrench yourself and print one of your own, It’s a cool design - it prints in one piece, with fully working ratchet and everything. I printed one a couple of years ago.
Even more exciting is the ability to 3d print aatellites in orbit. Send up a small box containing a printer and the raw material, and it can spin out large antennas or other structures needed for large satellites, deep space probes or habitats.
I can imagine mining titanium powder on the moon (there’s lots of titanium in the regolith over wide swaths of the lunar surface). Send the stuff into lunar or earth orbit with either an electromagnetic rail system or a steam powered nuclear transfer vehicle, using lunar sourced water.
Once the powder arrives at the manufacturing station in orbit, it is laser sintered into titanium components of all sorts, which are then incorporated into new aatellites.
At some point, we may be able to make satellites by shipping only core pieces (electronics, motors, etc), and attaching it to structures built autonomously in orbit. I can imagine private company flying a large 3d printing facility in orbit, then offering manufactured parts like trusses and frames and antennas and such. Send up the files for all the printable parts you need for your satellite, then when you send up the core pieces, all the heavy parts are waiting in orbit.
The tech for this already exists - it’s just a matter of engineering it for space use and putting it all together. Titanium 3d printers can be had for as little as $25,000. Energy to power it is unlimited in orbit - especially if you can bootstrap construction of solar panels to power it.
Solar power sarellites are infeasable if launched from Earth, but if we could manufacture titanium trusses and solar panels in space from cheaply sourced lunar materials, it’s a whole new ball game.
The robot is called Stretch and looks relatively dull for a Boston Dynamics creation. It’s not modeled after humans or animals, and instead aims to be as practical as possible. It has a square mobile base containing a set of wheels, a “perception mast” with cameras and other sensors, and a huge robotic arm with seven degrees of freedom and a suction pad array on the end that can grab and move boxes up to 23 kilograms (50 lbs) in weight.
I came in to post a link and Discourse indexed me to posts from last fall; as i scrolled down and skimmed things, I noticed your post, Babale, and thought it tied in great with what I came in to post:
This AI can make video with speech from written scripts, and it can do it in under a minute, complete with inflections and appropriate body language.
BAM! Here’s some more cool science news:
Yes, this is “bubble baby disease”, made famous by the Travolta TV flick in the '70s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
I completely missed this last November; a short video of a woman using a new bionic/myoelectric arm & hand prosthesis.
It reminds me a lot of the one that Angel Giuffria has but somehow seems ‘clunkier’ or something.
I had to laugh a bit at her holding the knife with her bionic hand and the apple with her meat hand. I know they’re trying to demo the dexterity, but–gah! I would never hold the knife with my bionic hand if I had one. That’s the cut-resistant one!