Robert Playter

In fact,

I probably didn't really see the nice natural walking that I expected out of our humanoids until maybe last year.

And the team was developing on our newer generation of Atlas some new techniques for developing a walking control algorithm.

And they got that natural looking motion as sort of a byproduct of just a different process they were applying to developing the control.

So that probably took 15 years, 10 to 15 years to sort of get that from, you know, the Petman prototype was probably in 2008.

And what was it?

2022.

Last year that I think I saw a good walking on Atlas.

Yeah, so one of the things that makes this straight leg a challenge is you're sort of up against a singularity, a mathematical singularity, where when your leg is fully extended, it can't go further the other direction, right?

You can only move in one direction.

And that makes all of the calculations around how to produce torques at that joint or positions makes it more complicated.

And so having all of the mathematics so it can deal with these singular configurations is one of many challenges that we face.

And I'd say in the...

In those earlier days, again, we were working with these really simplified models.

So we're trying to boil all the physics of the complex human body into a simpler subsystem that we can more easily describe in mathematics.

And sometimes those simpler subsystems don't have all of that complexity of the straight leg built into them.

And so what's happened more recently is we're able to apply techniques that let us take the full physics of the robot into account and deal with some of those strange situations like the straight leg.

Are you falling?

Underactuated is the right word, right?

You can't push the robot in any direction you want to, right?