Atlas Robot, Housecleaning

Atlas, a stay at home mom, now vacuums and does other household chores...

Meet Atlas, LazyBoyTech's favorite bipedal, humanoid robot. Originally developed by Google-owned Boston Dynamics with government funding back in 2013 for military projects, the project has taken the sudden turn toward domestic housework. The control algorithm, developed by IHMC, not only enables the robot to stand balanced on two feet, but also enables it to interact with other objects and accomplish simple tasks. Although rudimentary in its current state, this is definitely a step up from the wind-up monkey I tried to get to clean my room back in middle school.

Recently IHMC programmed Atlas to do some household chores to demonstrate whole-body coordinated motions. In the video you can see here, Atlas does a couple of simple household tasks. The video is speed up 20X real-time because it currently takes the robot a long time to accomplish any of these tasks, much like myself. Also check out another video here, where a shinny white version of Atlas tries to pick up a box, only to have it knocked out of its hands by a guy with a hockey stick. (I want that job.)

At one point in the video Atlas kicks over a block of wood it had set up and then waves its arms in the air. Not sure what the intention of this was; but I can envision the possibility of the robot recognizing when a situation has gone south and then notifying the appropriate parties in danger. Which could lead to the hilarious video of a robot waving its arms at another after the vacuum cleaner goes out of control.

This changes the inevitable question of: "Will this eventually lead to robots cleaning up my room?" To the definitive statement of: "When will robots start cleaning up my room?" All things considered, this is not a positive development for human incentive.