Watching ATLAS evolve and master new skills is as fascinating as watching a child develop. Except the humanoid robot, seen here in the lab at Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, is gaining new capabilities faster than any human should be comfortable with.
It seems like just yesterday that ATLAS was stumbling over a simulated debris field, and now we see it balancing on one foot on the edge of a thin sheet of plywood.
It’s like putting a crawling infant on the ground for a few seconds while you tend to something else, and then turning back to find it asking for your car keys so it can go to the mall, or join the Army.
[YouTube via IEEE Spectrum]