“Man, I sure hope I get to see a video of a massive robot stomping around a hiking trail today!”
Your wish is my command, my friend.
We’ve seen plenty of footage of ATLAS (the two-legged humanoid robot being built by the now Google-owned Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA) walking around. The vast majority of it has been indoors, in tightly controlled lab environments.
While it’s ever so fleeting, the last 30 seconds of this clip shows ATLAS getting some sun as it tromps around the woods.
It’s still got a big ol’ tether strapped to it for power (turns out keeping a 300lb robot powered is pretty tough), and sure, it looks a wee bit drunk for a few seconds there at the beginning — but just think about how crazy this is. Bipedal humanoid robots were a SciFi writer’s pipe dream maybe 40 years ago; now they’re out hangin’ with the birds.
And in case you missed it: the same company’s work on four-legged robots is perhaps even crazier.