Savvy Marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news cycles last week. The larger of the two was, of course, the announcement of the electric Atlas. As I write this, the less than 40-second video is steadily approaching five million views. The day before, the company had touched the hearts of the community by announcing that the original Hydraulic Atlas was to be put to pasturea decade after its introduction.
The accompanying video was a celebration of the old Atlas’ journey from DARPA research project to incredibly agile bipedal robot. But after a minute, the tone changes. Ultimately, “Farewell to Atlas” is as much a celebration as it is a blooper reel. It’s a good reminder that every time the robot records the landing on video, there are dozens of slips, falls and crackles.
I have long advocated this type of transparency. This is the kind of thing I’d like to see more of in the world of robotics. Just showing the highlight reel does a disservice to the effort that went into getting these shots. In many cases, we’re talking about years of trial and error dedicated to getting robots to look good on camera. When you only share positive results, you set unrealistic expectations for yourself. Bipedal robots fall. In that sense, at least, they are like us. Like Agility I put it on recently, “Everyone falls sometimes, it’s how we get back up that defines us.” I would go further and add that learning to fall well is just as important.
The company’s new CTO, Pras Velagapudi, recently told me that seeing robots falling on the job at this point is actually a good thing. “When a robot is actually out in the world and doing real things, unexpected things are going to happen,” he notes. “You’re going to see some crashes, but that’s part of learning to run really long distances in real-world environments. It’s expected, and it’s a sign that you’re not acting things out.
A Quick Overview of Harvard Rules to fall without injury reflects what we intuitively understand about falls as human beings:
- Protect your head
- Use your weight to direct your fall
- bend your knees
- Avoid bringing other people with you
As for robots, this Last year’s IEEE Spectrum piece is a great place to start.
“We’re not afraid of a fall — we don’t treat robots like they’re going to break all the time,” Aaron Saunders, CTO of Boston Dynamics, told the publication last year. “Our robot falls a lot, and one of the things we decided a long time ago is that we need to build robots that can fall without breaking. If you can follow this cycle of pushing your robot to fail, studying the failure, and fixing it, you can progress where it doesn’t fall. But if you build a machine, a control system, or a culture around the principle of never falling, you will never learn what you need to keep your robot from falling. We celebrate falls, even those that break the robot.
The topic of drops also came up when I spoke with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter ahead of the Electric Atlas’ launch. Notably, the short video begins with the robot in a prone position. The way the robot’s legs brace themselves is quite novel, allowing the system to stand up from a completely flat position. At first glance, it almost seems like the company is showing off, using this flashy gesture simply as a method of showcasing the extremely robust custom actuators.
“There will be some very practical uses for this,” Playter told me. “The robots will fall. You better be able to get up from lying down. He adds that the ability to stand up from a prone position can also be useful for loading purposes.
Much of Boston Dynamics’ knowledge about falls comes from Spot. While there is generally more stability in the quadruped form factor (as evidenced by decades of trying and failing to topple robots in videos), there are simply many more robot hours Spot working in real conditions.
“Spot travels around 70,000 km per year in factories, carrying out around 100,000 inspections per month,” adds Playter. “They end up falling. You have to be able to get up. I hope you reduce your drop rate – we did it. I think we fall once every 100 to 200 km. The drop rate has really gotten low, but it happens.
Playter adds that the company has a long history of being “tough” on its robots. “They fall and they have to be able to survive. Fingers cannot fall off.
Looking at Atlas’ shots above, it’s hard not to project a bit of human empathy onto the “robot.” He truly seems to fall like a human, bringing his extremities as close to his body as possible, to protect them from further injury.
When Agility added weapons to Digit, in 2019, it discussed the role they play in the downfall. “For us, arms are both a tool for moving through the world – think getting up after a fall, flailing your arms for balance, or pushing a door – while also being useful for manipulating or carry things,” said co-founder Jonathan. Hurst noted at the time.
I spoke to Agility a bit about the topic at Modex earlier this year. The video of a Digit robot falling on a conference room a year earlier had made the rounds on social networks. “With a 99% success rate over approximately 20 hours of live demos, Digit still suffered a few drops at ProMat,” Agility noted at the time. “We have no proof, but we believe our sales team orchestrated it so they could talk about the fast-changing industries and sustainability of Digits.”
As with the Atlas video, the company told me that a near-fetal position was helpful in protecting the robot’s legs and arms.
The company uses reinforcement learning to help fallen robots get back up. Agility disabled Digit’s obstacle avoidance for the video above in order to force a fall. In the video, the robot uses its arms to soften the fall as much as possible. He then uses his reinforcement learning to return to a familiar position from which he is able to stand up with a robotic pump.
One of the main selling points of humanoid robots is their ability to integrate into existing workflows: these factories and warehouses are known as “brownfields”, meaning they have not been custom built for automation. In many cases of industrial automation, errors cause the system to shut down until human intervention.
“Rescuing a humanoid robot will not be trivial,” says Playter, noting that these systems are heavy and can be difficult to right manually. “How are you going to do this if it can’t take off?” »
If these systems truly want to guarantee uninterrupted automation, they will have to fall down well and get back up immediately.
“Every time Digit drops, we learn something new,” adds Velagapudi. “When it comes to bipedal robotics, fall is a wonderful teacher.”