We’ve seen Boston Dynamics’ animal-inspired robots perform some impressive tasks over the years, from stacking boxes, to doing backflips, to performing sick dance moves, to pulling an airplane. But you can’t expect robot perfection 100% of the time, can you?
During a recent on-stage demo of their soon-to-be-produced Spot Mini robot, something went horribly wrong, and one robot basically keeled over and died in the middle of a presentation. The problem child came out on stage to demonstrate its payload handling abilities during Amazon’s re:MARS conference, and just when we thought it was going to do something nifty, it freaked out and collapsed.
I’m assuming it was some kind of technical glitch, but it’s also possible the little guy got stage fright in front of all those spectators, and just froze in his tracks. Watch the poor little quadruped fail spectacularly in the videos below:
Womp pic.twitter.com/TGAVSIb46X
— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBC) June 5, 2019
#reMars Boston Dynamics live demo – so cool and reminder that running workload just on spot instance can fail :-) pic.twitter.com/ph8pyk3HQp
— RBA (@benalt) June 5, 2019
I don’t know about you, but this gives me some hope for humans to find a fatal flaw in these robots when the inevitable robot uprising takes hold.
[via Digg]
As a child of the ’80s, I was involved in some very questionable dealings that would see the State taking kids away today. One such occasion was when my paraplegic grandfather took me on the backroads to the drive-up beer store to get his favorite Schlitz beer. Long story short, 8-year-old me ended up driving him home in an El Camino with hand controls while he guzzled said brewski. Instruction consisted of “push this to go, pull it to stop.” I’m pretty sure he is the reason Texas now has an open container law.
This Siemens autonomous Mustang went up the famed Goodwood hill climb in approximately the same fashion I was able to drive us home that day, which is to say slowly and weaving around the road.
The main difference is that my safety driver, who grabbed the wheel every now and again, was an elderly man hopped up on Schlitz with no legs below the knees. A such a glorious time. We didn’t even wear seatbelts and I had to drive on my knees to see over the wheel. Goodwood 2018 wasn’t such a glorious time for the Siemens Mustang.
The car is a modified 1965 Ford Mustang outfitted with GPS and sensor tech that appears to lackthe accuracy needed for the task. As a result, the car went slowly and weaved all over the place. It even tried to drive into the crowd a few times as Mustangs often do. If this is the future of autonomous cars, I want no part of it.
If you’re looking for a slightly more impressive autonomous run at Goodwood, check out this lap from Roborace:
[via CNET]
