Boston Dynamics probably has the most show-offy robots on the planet right now, and the company’s latest video shows that its robodog, Spot, is no exception. Spoiler alert: he nails a septuple back flip that is wildly impressive.
Spot, the dog-like Robot from robotics pioneers Boston Dynamics has been around in some form or another since 2015. Since that time, Spots have been dispatched to Italy to patrol ancient ruins in Pompeii; to New Zealand to herd sheep; and to Norway to work on an oil rig.
The tough yet versatile bots have also shown off their soft sides, twerking in 2018, dancing in the New Year in 2020, and getting down to help the Rolling Stones celebrate the 40-anniversary of their Tattoo You album. The bots really had their time in the spotlight earlier this year when a pack of them competed on the TV show America’s Got Talent, and even advanced to the next round.
But despite all of the skills Spot has been able to demonstrate, the robot was never designed to perform backflips. That didn’t stop Boston Dynamics robot engineer, Arun Kumar, from trying – and eventually succeeding in quite impressive style.
“Spot wasn’t designed to do a backflip,” says Kumar in the following video showing off the accomplishment. “My team didn’t even think it could do a standing backflip before I started working on this. So for Spot, it took awhile because we had to operate at the extremes of the hardware.”
Air Spot | RL Behavior Research | Boston Dynamics
Kumar details how the bot was trained to do its task, a process involving neural networks and the dispatch of “rewards” when Spot did something right – a journey, he says, that was akin to training a real dog.
While seeing Spot carry out his septuple backflip at the end of the video is impressive, as Kumar says, the real thrust behind the exercise is that the robodog needs to be able to respond to a wide range of conditions when it is operating in the real world – including slips and falls. And as martial artists have known for millennia, sometimes the best way to deal with a fall is to turn it into a flip.
If the new Spot video gets your gears revving and you want to see other impressive robotic feats, you could check out Boston Dynamics’ other bot, Atlas showing off its breakdancing moves; Unitree’s G1 humanoid leaping and twisting; or Astribot’s amazingly smooth bot folding clothes, practicing calligraphy, and working in the kitchen.
Source: Boston Dynamics
