Robert Playter

It's a level of complexity that I think goes above foot ground contact when you really start doing dexterous manipulation.

So there's challenges ahead still.

Out of a can, out of a can.

Maybe Atlas could spill his beer because he's got nowhere to put it.

Atlas could walk on the sand.

So can it?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, have we really had him out on the beach?

You know, we take them outside often, you know, rocks, hills, that sort of thing, even just around our lab in Waltham.

We probably haven't been on the sand, but I'm... Soft surfaces.

I don't doubt that we could deal with it.

We might have to spend a little bit of time to sort of make that work, but we did take... We had to take...

Big Dog to Thailand years ago.

And we did this great video of the robot walking in the sand, walking into the ocean, up to, I don't know, its belly or something like that, and then turning around and walking out, all while playing some cool beach music.

Great show, but then we didn't really clean the robot off and the salt water was really hard on it.

So we put it in a box, shipped it back.

By the time it came back, we had some problems

That just wasn't our goal at the time.

In the early days of developing Big Dog, the loose rock was the epitome of the hard walking surface because you step down and then the rock, and you have these little point feet on the robot, and the rock can roll.

And you have to deal with that last minute change in your foot placement.