Robots teach themselves martial arts to avoid smashing into the ground

“A few weeks ago, I slipped in the shower, and after a cartoonish sequence of body contortions, I caught myself while landing. Robots aren’t as lucky.

As the DARPA Robotics Challenge taught us, when machines fall, they tumble terribly and without the ability to brace themselves.

But those days might be over thanks to a computer program created by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

A new algorithm from allows robots to fall with style. Video by Georgia Institute of Technology.

So rather than the full impact being felt by a single part of the robot, the robot can displace the kinetic energy created during the fall over multiple parts of its body. By learning how to tumble, robots reduced impact intensity to the head by 30 to 90 percent.”

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Also, the latest video of Atlas below, released over the weekend by the robotics team at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, is the latest example out of the lab to exhibit its 6’2, 330 lbs mass of metal in action.

Unlike earlier examples, however, the latest YouTube clip of the robot, nicknamed Ian, shows the colossal creation balancing in a way that would be difficult for most anyone to execute, absent the utmost athletic ability.

Boston Dynamics and DARPA, the Pentagon’s personal science lab of sorts, have helped supply Atlas models to institutions across the United States, including Florida’s IHMC, in hopes of seeing what the nation’s brightest robotics engineers are capable of when they port their own personalized software in the skin of the cyborg-like automaton.

Atlas robot at IHMC standing on a stack of cinder blocks doing various poses. Robot is built by Boston Dynamics. Control algorithm by IHMC. Video is real time. Check it out below:

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[source : pbs.org, rt.com]