Inside the Lab: Taking Atlas From Sim to Scaffold

[Music] foreign this video should in many ways look familiar to those who've seen our videos in the past but it's meant to communicate an expansion of the research that we're doing on Atlas so we're not just thinking about how to make the robot move dynamically through its environment like we did in parkour and dance now we're starting to put Atlas to work and think about how the robot should be able to perceive and manipulate objects in its environment while maintaining that characteristic high level of performance that we expect from Atlas in order to do that the robot has to be able to think about the properties of objects their shape their Mass properties and as it's manipulating these objects the constraints that exist between the robot and the object the forces that exist and it has to have a control system that's able to balance what may be competing objectives related to stability or the manipulation task at hand my role in the project was working on perception and autonomy so perception is letting the robot know what it's seeing and autonomy is letting it choose what it's doing next at a high level where it's going to go and what it's planning to do it's all software so we're writing code that runs onboard Atlas and it's got computers on board that are processing the camera data so they can see the objects in front of it in this video we're doing a lot of object manipulation lifting this piece of wood placing it down lifting up the tool bag and eventually jumping and trying to throw it precisely up onto the top left so Atlas has a couple of cameras that we use to see the world around it and they work not entirely unlike a human eyeballs so we can see the colors of object of things around us and we can get some information about how far they are away uh we use that to build models of the environment so we might know that we're going to be running over a sequence of boxes and so we see some box-like shapes out in front of us we decide oh those are probably boxes and we go and we decide to run on top of each of those boxes and that works really well when the environment looks something like what we're expecting the atlas perception system works with the cameras that are in the head it has a color camera and has another camera called a depth camera so this uses photons time of flight to measure the distances to everything that it can see we basically are looking for shapes in the environment and other features in the environment that Atlas can use to identify key objects of Interest foreign and then the next thing it's going to go do is go look for the bag so it's been told the bag is somewhere over here and now it's got a turn and right after that turn the bag is now in the view out here in the distance and so it's going to start estimating the pose of the bag you can see there it's it's found it and it's sort of thinking about the shape of the bag and how it wants to grasp it like that and then it comes in [Music] and we get a nice view in the front camera here [Music] of the grippers making the grasp on around the bag like that so the way that we approach this problem is a technique called Model predictive control and the idea is that the robot's control system should be able to think about how its motion is going to evolve in time in a way that respects the physical laws of our universe so for example if you're Imagining the robots holding a heavy object while trying to run or pushing something that weighs on the order of its body mass across the room carefully considering the forces that exist between the robot and the object and how that might or might not tip the robot over for example is really important to success so a predictive controller is a way of doing controls by thinking about what's going to happen in the future and a really simple example is that when you stand up as a person your heart has to pump harder to make sure you have enough blood pressure to do that and in fact if you look at people's heart rates they go up before they start standing up so your body is sort of thinking about what is my heart going to need to do now so that in half a second I'm ready to be standing and the robot's doing exactly the same thing so it's thinking about how hard do I need to push with my right foot so that one second from now I'm not falling over my role in this project was to basically take the controller that we had before we started this manipulation effort and extended so that explicitly thinks about the the object that it's holding so it has an explicit model of the object and its interaction with the robot so we're interested in manipulating very heavy objects so inertially significant in a sense which means that actually thinking about the forces acting on the object and action equals minus reaction the forces that the object exerts on the robot also is becomes very important I think one of the hardest things about grabbing an object and moving it around with the robot is that it creates an entirely new set of problems of trying to decide where is this object that I'm manipulating and how is it moving it's already hard for a robot to know where it is so when we're trying to manipulate something like a plank we have to just make pretty educated guesses about where is the plank how fast is it moving how do we need to move the arms to cause the plank to spin 180 degrees very quickly and if we get those estimates wrong we end up doing silly things and falling over so we're unable to read the uh the encoder the position encoder for our elbow our shoulder X we call that it's when the robot lifts its arm up like this so uh we can't command it if it doesn't know where it's at and sometimes sensors will break cables will unplug um and so we're doing a really fast diagnosis to figure out what's happening I am the the electrical Tech atlas's electrical doctor and uh and these other two folks here uh Bill and Crystal there they're both partially electrical and very mechanical Tech so right now they're checking in on the wiring and I'm watching see if there's any signs of Life as we uh go through and see maybe we have a loose connection or maybe we have a dead sensor if they use similar hydraulic systems in with Formula One card essentially and they would every event they would take everything down and probably replace the seals I'm assuming and the difference is they know what uh the use cases where here they're doing new things every pretty much every time they run they're trying new uh movements that might overextend an arm or a leg or collide with another part of the robot so everything Atlas does in the real world we developed in simulation first the simulator is sort of like a video game it's a virtual world and Atlas can run around in that world and we can test a lot of variations of of the behavior before we run it in the real world that helps us understand the limits of what the robot can do you know can it jump even farther can it jump even higher we can explore all of those questions in the simulator and then we can test them on the real hardware and often those tests in the real world will result in a broken robot which is fine we can fix it but if we want to push the boundaries we can do that in Sim first yeah one of the main things I've worked on this in this production that's been the the final jump so we have a jump where it's doing a flip in there so it previously we've done one axis flips so we've done a backflip that goes only on one axis and right now with this new Jump it spins around multiple axes but one of the big challenges here has been that we're working at the very limit of the robot so we've had to do a lot of a lot of changes to the controller and basically we wouldn't have been able to do this kind of jump just one year ago the robot squeezing its limbs in uh the same way that a figure skater would tuck their arms in to spin faster so it's actually trying to become as small as possible to spin really really fast to get all the way around so the move you're seeing at the end we refer to internally is the sick trick as kind of our code name for it I hope the world thinks it's as sick as we do it's a flip with a bunch of spins I think it's something like an inverted 540 robot is starting facing out and then it spins and when it lands it's facing back at its takeoff box it was a very cool move and it took a lot of work to get that to land cleanly it it certainly inspires people to say what if we could make a robot that can do this and we can start exploring those questions first with Atlas And if something seems to be working really well or we see some application in it we can develop that technology further and move it into our products that are actually going out and operating in the real world while the dream of humanoids is that they should be able to do all the things that we do right a humanoid robot will be well suited for applications like manufacturing factory work construction where a humanoid form factor actually fits very well with its bimanual nature its ability to stand upright move heavy things around and work in spaces that were traditionally designed for humans to do work in I think what we're focusing right now for real world applications for this kind of robot things like moving objects that are pretty heavy especially in environments where it's either too dangerous for humans or where it's just generally something people don't want to be doing I really want to see robots helping out in Disaster Response scenarios I want to see robots moving around in the world in ways that allow humans to do things that are better and safer and happier with their lives foreign [Music]

Channel: Boston Dynamics

Views: 2,224,644

Keywords: boston dynamics, boston dynamics robot, boston dynamics atlas, boston dynamics parkour, atlas, atlas robot, atlas parkour, partners in parkour, what's new atlas, atlas gets a grip, atlas picks things up

Id: XPVC4IyRTG8

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Mortal-Region]

The company is using simulation not just for testing (to avoid expensive accidents) but also to implement so-called Model Predictive Control (MPC). MPC is a control scheme where an agent continuously runs simulations into the future in order plan its actions. The Atlas Robot uses its senses to construct a dynamic, physics-based model of its local environment, and a physics engine (like the ones used in videogames) steps the model forward in time to guide Atlas' interactions with the environment.

This is significant to this sub because it's thought that brains might employ the same kind of mechanism. The simulation theory of cognition proposes that thinking consists of simulated interaction with the environment. Some believe that this process of continuously and interactively simulating oneself into the future might be the basis of consciousness.