DARPA Creates Humanoid Robot That Jumps, Climbs And Avoids Obstacles With Ease

newstech

26 Oct

DARPA's most recent creation, the PET-PROTO Robot, has the capability to navigate such obstacles as climbing, jumping, and traversing a wall-to-wall hole in the floor. The company says it's designed to perform complex tasks in "dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments;" but the possibilities of outrunning Skynet are now lower than ever.

Showing an amazing amount of flexibility in its bipedal movement, the Boston Dynamics' PET-PROTO humanoid demonstrates its vast abilities by scaling a knee-high ledge, leaping to the floor on the other side and bridging itself across a hole in the floor.

Looking almost like a prototype of MGS4's Gecko.

This was created as part of DARPA's latest robotics competition, to expand the capabilities of humanoids to the point where they could repair meltdowns at nuclear plants, rescue people trapped in collapsed buildings, and assist with other disaster-mitigation efforts. The PET-PROTO demonstrates the amazing implementation of autonomous decision making a robot of this class would require, determining the traversal of terrain on its own accord.

Simply put, this is both the most fascinating and horrifying demonstration of artificial intelligence we've seen for a while. Well worth a watch.