Video of the Day – Watch Google’s Humanoid Robot “Atlas” Stomp Around a Forest

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Longtime readers of Liberty Blitzkrieg will be familiar with Google’s humanoid robot “Atlas” from the 2013 post titled: DARPA Unveils “Atlas”: A 6 Foot Tall Humanoid Robot.

Well it appears Atlas has grown up quite a bit over the past two years, and is now capable of strutting its stuff beyond the lab, and into the great American outdoors.

The Washington Post covered this momentous event earlier today:

Atlas is an “agile, anthropomorphic robot” (who apparently is also fond of alliteration). Atlas was created by Boston Dynamics, the Google-owned robotics company also famous for its speedy robotic cheetah and its swimming, snow-climbing BigDog. And recently, Atlas went for its first-ever walk in the woods.

According to the Boston Globe, much of the company’s research is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is trying to develop robots that can perform tasks in military and disaster-related situations that would be unsafe for humans. And the company originally began as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, according to its Web site.

Atlas still isn’t quite ready to venture out on its own — in the video shown at Fab 11, the robot remained tethered to a power source as it tramped around the woods.

“I’m not saying it can do everything you can do,” Raibert said, “but you can imagine if we keep pushing we’ll get there.”