Hey NASA: This Is The Droid You Were Looking For
Keith’s note: Too bad NASA JSC’s R5 Robot is broken – and when it does work it can only do so on tethers and hoists. This Boston Dynamics robot can follow you home through the woods and then clean up your garage. Or pick up moon rocks and put them inside the sample return vehicle.
– Is JSC’s R5 Droid Worth Fixing?, earlier post
– Too bad NASA’s R5 robot is broken and can’t do anything unless it is on hoists and tethers., earlier post
– Never Ask NASA a Simple Question, earlier post
– NASA JSC Has Developed A Girl Robot in Secret (Revised With NASA Responses), earlier post
Concur Keith. Is it just me or was that unnecessary cruelty to our future robotic overlords. No wonder Skynet gets uppity… after seeing this perhaps!
Very impressive demonstration. One wonders how well the scanning laser (?) and other systems will hold up against Lunar and Martian fines.
I think they were demonstrating the robot’s remarkable capacity for restraint in not killing humans. Truly impressive.
You know the robot revolution s here when the next generation robot kicks the @#$% out of the guy with the hockey stick and makes him pick up the box!
Or pokes a big hole in him with a megaWatt laser.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That thing is pretty cool, especially the ability to lift boxes and recover from a fall. If they can improve the grip, then some of them would be very useful for loading stuff into cars and trucks at stores (especially if you could get them to load the heavy stuff).
If you paired something like that with a recharge station/bigger rover to ride on, then you could definitely use it for space exploration.
Four Big Dogs pulling a cart full of solar panels and lab equipment?
(The cart is also a robot.)
They need a lot of juice – four might be too much. Wikipedia says they run on 11-KW engines. Curiosity gets about 100-ish watts of power out of its RTG.
Maybe you could make your cart a Zubrin-esque fuel-making plant, making methane or methanol fuel during the day and providing it for the rovers for their next day of exploration. It would need a large solar panel set. And of course you’d downscale – they’d be Small Dogs.
I’d not want to be that guy. Our future overlords will remember who was nice, and who wasn’t.
I doubt that thing would last long enough to clean out my garage. The other robots might cannibalize it first.
Nasa doesn’t really need to design a robot as other users can do that, but nasa needs to work on the radiation resistant computers it will need to work in space, whether it is a walker or a wheeled rover.
I’d argue they don’t need to work (much) on the computers either. The universities (e.g. cubesats) and commercial sector have done a fine job of this already. There is so much available today that is commercial/off the shelf that NASA really needs to focus on far reaching, enabling, technologies like LEO fuel depots.
Solid hiker.
Looks like a clumsy knock off of sleek Japanese tech.
Oh yeah??
Does this robot have his own custom trailer like NASA’s?? I don’t think so.