Boston Dynamics demonstrates Atlas robot lifting and carrying mini-fridge with whole-body coordination
Boston Dynamics demonstrated new capabilities of its Atlas humanoid robot by showing it lift a black mini-fridge from a wooden block, carry it across a lab while adjusting grip and posture for balance, and set it down on a table. The black-and-white robot marked 100 performed the task through reinforcement learning trained across millions of simulated variations. Atlas practiced the motion for millions of hours in parallel on GPUs, adapting to differences in mass, friction, grip, and positioning via proprioception rather than explicit visual recognition.
@Jason Eventually, the robots and goods & services will be free, but the dollar price of robots will be high in the beginning
@jason@JasonWe're going to have a massive surplus of extremely strong and dexterous robots to do extremely unnecessary tasks for us. I can't wait! ... predict these will be $1 an hour -- which is basically $8,760 a year. Insane. In fact, they'll probably sell them for $1 an hour with a minimum of 5,000 hours.
#517Andrew Curran@ANDREWCURRAN_Great demo, living up to the name. From the blog post:
'Atlas uses reinforcement learning (RL) to learn how to lift a fridge by practicing the move with an absurdly large number of variations of the fridge in simulation. The hardest part is not seeing the fridge or knowing how to lift it, but learning to adapt to whatever version of the fridge that Atlas will encounter in the real world. This is a combined control and perception problem, where perception is done implicitly from body proprioception. The policy driving the behavior has learned to adapt to variations like the location of the fridge, its mass, the amount of grip on the ground and with the fridge, or the configuration where the fridge settles in between the torso, arms, and hands. That level of adaptation is one of the most fundamental building blocks of physical intelligence.'
Boston Dynamics@BostonDynamicsEveryone asks if Atlas can bring them a drink, but this robot can bring you the whole fridge. Using AI-driven behaviors, Atlas is doing hard work and coordinating its whole body to manage heavy objects, balancing complex contact points with accuracy and reliability.
#517Andrew Curran@ANDREWCURRAN_Boston Dynamics is hiring for RL roles.
Andrew Curran@AndrewCurran_Boston Dynamics is hiring for RL roles.
#517Andrew Curran@ANDREWCURRAN_
Chris Paxton@chris_j_paxtonThis is very similar to our work from last year https://www.agilityrobotics.com/content/training-a-whole-body-control-foundation-model
#687Bojan Tunguz@TUNGUZSo need this.
Boston Dynamics@BostonDynamicsEveryone asks if Atlas can bring them a drink, but this robot can bring you the whole fridge. Using AI-driven behaviors, Atlas is doing hard work and coordinating its whole body to manage heavy objects, balancing complex contact points with accuracy and reliability.
#732Chris Paxton@CHRIS_J_PAXTONNew/mass production atlas carrying an entire mini fridge like it's nothing. Payload capacity for humanoids is often very low, when it really should be one of their defining attributes.
As an aside, BD has a long history of these gimmicky one off demos, but they've been churning them out pretty quickly lately. I think that's a good sign that the company is shortening development times and getting closer to something they can ship.
Boston Dynamics@BostonDynamicsEveryone asks if Atlas can bring them a drink, but this robot can bring you the whole fridge. Using AI-driven behaviors, Atlas is doing hard work and coordinating its whole body to manage heavy objects, balancing complex contact points with accuracy and reliability.
#732Chris Paxton@CHRIS_J_PAXTON"Robot bring me a beer" task failed successfully
#732Chris Paxton@CHRIS_J_PAXTONThis is very similar to our work from last year https://www.agilityrobotics.com/content/training-a-whole-body-control-foundation-model
Andrew Curran@AndrewCurran_Great demo, living up to the name. From the blog post: 'Atlas uses reinforcement learning (RL) to learn how to lift a fridge by practicing the move with an absurdly large number of variations of the fridge in simulation. The hardest part is not seeing the fridge or knowing how to lift it, but learning to adapt to whatever version of the fridge that Atlas will encounter in the real world. This is a combined control and perception problem, where perception is done implicitly from body proprioception. The policy driving the behavior has learned to adapt to variations like the location of the fridge, its mass, the amount of grip on the ground and with the fridge, or the configuration where the fridge settles in between the torso, arms, and hands. That level of adaptation is one of the most fundamental building blocks of physical intelligence.'
#1032Rohan Paul@ROHANPAUL_AIBoston Dynamics showed Atlas lifting and carrying a 100+ lb mini-fridge, using reinforcement learning to handle weight, grip, position, and balance through body proprioception.
shows how humanoids may handle hard labor: not by seeing objects better, but by adapting through contact, body feedback, domain-randomized training, and hardware built for strength and repairability.
Boston Dynamics@BostonDynamicsEveryone asks if Atlas can bring them a drink, but this robot can bring you the whole fridge. Using AI-driven behaviors, Atlas is doing hard work and coordinating its whole body to manage heavy objects, balancing complex contact points with accuracy and reliability.
#1061@jason@JASONWe're going to have a massive surplus of extremely strong and dexterous robots to do extremely unnecessary tasks for us.
I can't wait!
... predict these will be $1 an hour -- which is basically $8,760 a year. Insane.
In fact, they'll probably sell them for $1 an hour with a minimum of 5,000 hours.
Boston Dynamics@BostonDynamicsEveryone asks if Atlas can bring them a drink, but this robot can bring you the whole fridge. Using AI-driven behaviors, Atlas is doing hard work and coordinating its whole body to manage heavy objects, balancing complex contact points with accuracy and reliability.
