Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot Says Hold My Beer While I Execute Ninja Skills
The video starts off impressively enough, with the nearly 6-foot tall Atlas robot jumping onto a short platform, and then from one platform to another. It then jumps down again, only to jump up onto a platform roughly 3-ft tall (give or take a few inches) but the last platform is taller, almost twice as tall. What happens next is nothing short of amazing. Just watch the video...
Your eyes do not deceive you. Did that robot just do a freaking backflip? Just look at that form. He stuck that landing but good too. We don't think that the Atlas is going to be winning any Olympic medals anytime soon (even though it did throw its hands up in celebration like a true gymnast), but how many of us could actually do what it just accomplished?
This latest Boston Dynamics show off move comes just days after it highlighted its SpotMini bot in another YouTube showcase. SpotMini is a cute little robot dog that gallops around with fluid movements, vastly improving upon previous versions of quadruped Boston Dynamics robots.
Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google in 2013, and parent company Alphabet started looking for a buyer in Spring 2016. Just over a year later, Alphabet found a buyer: Japanese multinational telecommunications company SoftBank.
Is SoftBank looking to start a real-life Skynet? With ARM now under its helm and a $4 billion stake in NVIDIA (with all of its Tesla GPU AI-infused wizardry)? It certainly sounds plausible, depending on your propensity for conspiracy theories.
