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I’ve Fallen Over Today More Than This Robot

The need for bipedal, smart robots is clear.

I'm always tripping over myself, so it blows my dumb human mind that—despite not getting a million year evolutionary head start like humans—this robot can successfully navigate random stepping stones without falling over and becoming an expensive pile of trash.

The robot's name is Valkyrie, and it's designed by NASA's Johnson Space Centre to explore the possibility of using humanoid robots as avatars—like super space suits controlled remotely. But the robot's brains in this video are designed by IHMC Robotics, whose goal is to create robots that can walk to all the same places a human could walk.

Valkyrie is processing what it sees from its LIDAR sensor to then find suitable "planar" regions for stepping on, eventually walking to a point specified by the robot's operator. You can see it in action in the top left of this video. Step by step, Valkyrie makes it across the curved, uneven path. As evident from this video, where Valkyrie was just learning to stand up on one leg, it's come a long way in two years.

IHMC Robotics says that bipedal walking is one of the biggest challenges for humanoid robots, and it gets even harder when you bring uneven terrain into the picture. That's not hard to believe, considering these Boston Dynamics bloopers.

The need for bipedal, smart robots is clear. It's no use having a super AI if you can't get it where you want it, such as disaster zones, repairing vehicles in the vacuum of space, or on the deadly surfaces of planets or moons. While wheels or tracks could easily replace legs, in the majority of instances, the world we've created around us is fine-tuned for humans who walk with two legs and use two arms. Moreover, the aim of companies like IHMC Robotics is to nail what it calls the 'human-machine system design,' which demands systems be able to effectively work with a human operator.