The Two-Legged Robots Walking Into the Future

[Music] you see a toddler walking around and it just seems so easy and intuitive and natural it's actually a really complex problem that evolution has evolved us to be able to do but it's taken millions of years and to get that figured out in a way that's as efficient and as robust and natural I first see a day when we've got these machines reliable enough and capable enough to be meaningful partners there's a sense of wonderment of seeing something do actions that we're capable of doing as humans they're special a little different [Music] [Music] I grew up on a farm we had lots of land and we had motorcycles so I got into racing dirt bikes I love motors moving parts it's part of why I became a mechanical engineer and initially I wanted to build dirt bikes and I found them you know robotics and took that course instead a dirt bike is this mechanical thing that a human has to interact with we do similar things with our robot it's doing exactly what we told it to and we're just testing and it just happens to walk around it doesn't have feelings but it looks natural and people don't fully understand that it is just a machine it's just a computer we coded everything on it a bipedal robot is a robot with two legs bipedal robots that have been produced are really not focused on doing real tasks that are useful they're just more novelties so this is the Jew leader Ebonics this is our kind of main office where all the actual engineering happens where all the design work happens right now there are currently four Cassy's this is the kasi version three the basic robot as you can see is just kind of like a hip pelvis with legs that allows us to keep the robot pretty lightweight and really do some dynamic things bipedal robots are gonna help in a lot of different frontiers from space exploration to search and rescue a lot of the more dangerous and dirty jobs that we don't want to do with the Fukushima nuclear power plant tsunami disaster if all they could do was go in and turn a couple valves a lot of the consequences could have been averted and they asked like does anyone have a robot that can do this and there was kind of just a general no from the entire community this is our very first prototype Kassie robot that we designed the built here I know it kind of looks like a bird we didn't design it like that we designed it for dynamics it just starts to look more and more like an animal which I think it's kind of encouraging it's not intentional but it is hinting that maybe we're getting at some of the reasons that animal legs are shaped the way that they are legged locomotion it's something I've been excited about for a long time it's hard for me to remember how I got into robotics I've always been interested in building things and I've always been interested in how machines move my lab is focused entirely on legged locomotion on machines that walk and run and I I say more specifically my lab is focused on understanding how walking and running works certainly it's something that people have wanted to do forever you know all the way all the way back to this the first you know sketches and drawings like Leonardo da Vinci building automatons and robots I'd say that it's only more recent than people have had some success we see these great examples from Boston Dynamics we see the humanoid robotics community that's grown up starting in Japan ASIMO is a famous example recently we've had the DARPA Robotics Challenge where the hypothesis is that perhaps robots are almost to the point where they're gonna be useful it was a really good window into what is possible right now and there were robots that were walking around and there were robots that were very carefully considering their environment walking over somewhat rough terrain climbing up stairs and there were robots that successfully did that but they didn't necessarily do it quickly or well certainly any person could outperform those robots we design to build a trace we ultimately were able to show up at the DARPA Robotics Challenge as a demonstrator and show Atreus walking and running accelerating changing its speed going to what's something like a human's light jogging pace no other machine before Atreus had reproduced the human gait dynamics for walking Cassie is a major step forward from Atreus and it's very much a step on a ladder of robot prototypes and products that are going to keep on improving and improving there's a huge amount of work to be done a huge amount of development from this point the robot is even though it looks static stable like it's not doing anything this actually requires a fair amount of thinking the robot is figuring out what torque to send to each motor and what pose it should be in to maintain its balance and it does that so that as you push it and interact with it it actually responds it has kind of reflexes built in you can see it transferring Center pressure on the feet as I rock it forwards and backwards you know I can kind of give it some pushes forward and backwards sideways and interact with it so it doesn't know that I'm actually pushing it that's all kind of built-in reflex the robot is realizing from its inner ear that it's moving forwards and it shouldn't be Cassie is on the track of being able to run and jump where a lot of robots I mean there's a reason they call it the robot dance a lot of robots have that more just very slow methodical design about them where we're at now is more kind of like beta testing we see Cassie is kind of like a platform we can give to other highly capable engineers we have a really good relationship with the University of Michigan and we're kind of competing almost internally to see who could make the robot do cooler things [Music] so this mural is a little bit the history of the lab up into the Atreus series of robots that we call Marlow we're in the bipedal robotics laboratory at the University of Michigan this is where my students and I create the science of the future I like working on the bipedal robot just because when I see the light in people's eyes when this thing moves like a human it's it's magic ok so it gives you a huge sense of accomplishment the other thing I like about bipedal robots is the mathematics it is just hard but so satisfying when you figure out some of the riddles so some of the stuff that's built into humans so naturally from evolution I tried to use the mechanical models of the robot and I realized that motors are not muscles wiring and computers are not the same thing as neurons and brains we use the mathematics and advanced computing tools to try to extract out what is this particular machine capable of doing still experimental and it doesn't have all of the notions of balance built in but the mechanics are there we're putting a stereo camera onto Kassie it actually has two cameras left in a right camera and just like human eyes this is what allows us to see depth so this is going to allow Cassie to not only see what's in front of it but see how far away objects are at the top here you see Cassie walking around during an experiment with the stereo camera mounted on top and this is kind of what you're seeing from Cassie's point of view on the left here is raw video footage of the camera on top of Cassie and on the right here is what's called point cloud data so it's a 3d representation of what Cassie is seeing so the colors are actually how far away objects are from Cassie red being closest and blue or purple being farthest away being able to put a camera on to Cassie opens up a whole new world of possibilities for these types of robots [Applause] there's nothing fundamentally that is any more complicated than say a mid-range motorcycle in terms of precision for manufacturing or complexity it's really just being able to write down the answer of how does like a locomotion work once we understand that it will be very much possible to create machines for a reasonable price that can go in our environments where we go a lot of people are really concerned about robots for taking their jobs or feeling threatened by them automation computers robotics all of these things are changing our economies and we're going to have to change our society and how we handle that accordingly now the goal with agility is to have our robots be able to do more and more to support the entire research community to make hardware that is better and better every year and aim towards that world where robots are out in the environment the first time we've seen it stand up and kind of look around get a grasp of what it is that we've been working on all these years where we've gotten to now usually everybody's first reaction is in the remember of the bipedal robot that walked in Star Wars you know that was all supposed to be futuristic stuff and now it's the futures here I guess [Music] it's a lot of people don't appreciate the complexity because they're so used to science fiction movies they're so used to just watching toddlers and animals do it so naturally walking around that it seems like it should be easy but when you really break the problem up into all of its different components it's an incredibly complex and really difficult thing in order to get a robot to behave in a way that is even close to the performance robustness natural kind of elegance of humans walking around with Cassie we will be pushing the edge because what we want the robot to do is to perceive its environment as quickly as a human can do and then respond with the proper local motor commands once the robots are as capable as a human it's gonna be an easy call when there's a fire in a building and you have to make the choice do you sin in a human or do you send in a robot they're equally capable we just send in the robot and once they're that capable I think they're gonna start doing more and more of the tasks that we don't want to do our world is built for humans our buildings especially everything's designed for a typical human form so it makes sense to have an engineered solution similar to that we don't want it moving at the speed of a robot it's gonna be moving at the speed of life [Music]

Channel: Motherboard

Views: 701,198

Rating: 4.8703165 out of 5

Keywords: motherboard, motherboardtv, vice, vice magazine, documentary, science, technology, tech, sci-fi, artificial intelligence, AI, virtual reality, VR, vice videos, future, cryptocurrency, privacy, security, cyber, bipedal robots, walking robots, robots, terminator, boston dynamics, cassie, agility robotics, robotics, startup, humanoid, robots of the future, human robots

Id: OEXVGwEfq_E

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

now make it look like an AT-ST and let us buy them, this will solve all their funding problems forever.

[u/Twokidstoofun]

Cool

[u/stowie1021]

they're working on a complete humanoid. can't wait to see it.

[u/Black_RL]

Very impressive but not Boston Dynamics level.

• it looks more like dog legs than human legs
• the constant stepping looks awful

[u/untouchable_0]

Because those are the only parts they needed. lol

[u/cormano64]

Obviously the walking mechanics and mathematical calculations are the point of the video and they have relatively recently become interesting to me, but the machine vision bit is just absolutely fascinating.

[u/Mentioned_Videos]

Other videos in this thread:

Watch Playlist ▶

VIDEO	COMMENT
ATRIAS Biped Walking Robot	+7 - the constant stepping looks awful It's because Cassie is based on lessons learned from MARLO (same people), which had point feet. Cassie has very small feet because they wanted to keep the ankle motors as small as possible. You'll also notice the...
(1) Honda ASIMO Walk (slow motion) (2) ZMP-Walking Demo (3) Passive Walker	+5 - Human-like walking isn't really about looks. It's almost a technical term at this point, because it replaced the phrase "heel-toe walking". For a long time heel-toe walking was the hot new thing in bipedal robotics locomotion, replacing the older f...
人間のような自然な歩き方をするロボット( Biped robot walks just like a human being.)	+1 - Human-like walking isn't really about looks I don't know the cost of transport of Dr.Guero robot, but it looks quite close to Human walking.

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