Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and Spot robots can do many things: sprints, gymnastics routines, parkour, backflips, open doors to let in an army of their friends, wash dishes and get (bad) real work. But the company’s latest video adds another impressive trick to our future robot rulers’ repertoire: sick dance moves.
In the video, the entire series of robots from Boston Dynamics – the humanoid Atlas, the dog-shaped dot and the boxing juggling handle – are all put together in a captivating, coordinated dance routine, set to The Contours’ “Do You Love Me.”
This is not the first time Boston Dynamics has demonstrated the dancing skills of its robots: the company released a video in 2018 of its Spot robot doing the Running Man with ‘Uptown Funk’, but the new video takes things in stride ‘ another level, with the Atlas. robot tears it to the dance floor: running smoothly, jumping, shuffling and twisting through different movements.
Things get even more incredible as more robots send out and wander around in the kind of coordinated dance routine that puts my own, admittedly awful human dance to shame. Compared to the jerky movements of the 2016 version of Atlas, the new model looks almost like a CGI creation.
Boston Dynamics was recently acquired by Hyundai, which bought the robotics business SoftBank in a $ 1.1 billion deal. The company was originally founded in 1992 as a spin-off of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it became known for its canine-like four-legged robots (most notably the DARPA-funded BigDog, a forerunner of the company’s first commercial robot, Spot). .) It was purchased in 2013 by Alphabet’s X division, and then in 2017 by Softbank.
While the Atlas and Handle robots featured here are still just prototypes of research, Boston Dynamics recently started selling the Spot model to any business for the substantial price of $ 74,500. But can you really spend a price on it? to create your own legion of robust accomplices?