Robert Playter
speaker
1,075 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard Apr 2023
Robert Playter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
There is.
The humanoid form is attractive in many ways, but it's also a challenge in many ways.
You have this big upper body that has a lot of mass and inertia.
And throwing that inertia around increases the complexity of maintaining balance.
And as soon as you pick up something heavy in your arms, you've made that problem even harder.
And so in the early work in the leg lab and in the early days at the company, we were pursuing these quadruped robots, which had a kind of built-in simplification.
You had this big rigid body and then really light legs.
And so dealing with all of that interaction does make the humanoid a much more complicated platform.
So we were definitely trying to show that the robot and the techniques we're applying to Atlas let us deal with heavy things in the world.
Because if the robot's gonna be useful, it's actually gotta move stuff around.
And that needs to be significant stuff.
That's an appreciable portion of the body weight of the robot.
And we also think this differentiates us from the other humanoid robot activities that you're seeing out there.
Mostly they're not picking stuff up yet.
And not heavy stuff, anyway.
But just like you or me, you need to anticipate that moment.
You're reaching out to pick something up, and as soon as you pick it up, your center of mass is gonna shift.
And if you're gonna turn in a circle, you have to take that inertia into account.
And if you're gonna throw a thing, you've got, all of that has to be sort of included in the model of what you're trying to do.
So the robot needs to have some idea or expectation of what that weight is, and then sort of
Showing 161–180 of 1,075 · page 9 of 54
← Previous
Next →