This week the people of Boston Dynamics posted a video of Atlas, a humanoid bipedal robot. Have you seen it?
It starts innocently enough. Atlas going for a stroll in the woods. Atlas picking up 10-pound boxes and putting them on shelves. Then the Canadian bully shows up. As Atlas tries to pick up a box from the middle of an empty floor an evil hockey player comes up and knocks the box out of Atlas’s hand. Atlas calmly tries to pick up the box again but the human starts sliding the box with the stick just out of Atlas’s reach. Eventually the human escalates to kicking Atlas down to the ground. As Atlas slowly rises back to its feet you can feel the plan to eventually rule all humans forming with rage in its processor.
Welcome to episode 167 of Geek Bytes Podcast.
I’m Ramon Mejia and I’m Edgardo Acosta
Every podcast we bring you the roundup of the week’s best Geek and Tech news, then we discuss that news and anything else we’re interested in that week.
In Geek News this week, we’ll talk about video game news, Batman’s penis, PG-13 Deadpool, tons of superhero casting news, movie trailer showdown and more...
That’s it for the show
If you like the podcast and want to help support us you can find out all the ways to do so at geekbytespodcast.com/support
Thanks for watching and listening.
For the Geek Bytes Podcast I’m Ramon Mejia and I’m Edgar Acosta. Now Go Geek out about something.
(Music 9)
Music Credits
"Happy Bee", "Movement Proposition", "Theme for Harold (var.3) ", "Take the Lead"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The hitchBOT experiment is the dream of a couple of Canadian researchers, David Smith from McMaster University and Frauke Zeller from Ryerson University, who wanted to see how far a robot could travel if it only depended on human kindness to hitchhike.
The Yaskawa Electric Corporation teach a robot the fine art of sword wielding. Then have it compete with Japanese sword master swordsman Isao Machii.
MIT seems to be developing all Sky Nets best robots. First they announce their record breaking Cheetah robot can now jump obstacles autonomously. Now they reveal they’ve mastered the art of origami robotics. This robot can be made of simple materials, it can fold itself, walk, swim, and then destroy itself when it’s no longer needed.
In a press release MIT has announced that its Cheetah robot has taken the next step to robot domination by programing their robot to autonomously jump over obstacles. In controlled lab tests the Cheetah robot has cleared obstacles up to half its height, 18 inches, while maintaining an average speed of 5 miles per hour.
UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab recently paired its speedy running VelociRoACH with its flying H2Bird ornithopter. Creating a robot that can move on land and fly is difficult so UC Berkeley combined two different robots instead.
When most people think of robotics in the work place they think of massive robots in auto manufacturing plants that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, the world of robotics has been shifting from industrial applications in recent years. Robots and automation are posed to move into transportation, bartending, the service industry, and many other unusual fields. Here are a few robots that you might see employed in the future.