Automating Boston Dynamics Spot Robot - Computerphile
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- čas přidán 5. 04. 2022
- Could robots like this be sent into nuclear facilities to autonomously deal with toxic waste? That's the plan. Nick & Michal from Oxford Robotics Institute demonstrate & explain their automation of the familiar yellow robot 'spot.'
The project was the result of a collaboration between the Oxford Robotics Institute (particularly the DRS and GOALS groups) and Createc (createc.co.uk), and was supported by UKRI through the ISCF RAIN and ORCA Hubs, the AutoInspect project, and the EPSRC Programme Grant in Embodied Intelligence.
/ computerphile
/ computer_phile
This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
Thumbs up for the Floyd Warshall algorithm - we used it in a telecom network design tool 20 years ago. It probably deserves its own episode to explain it! Dr Mike Pound perhaps?
There is only Mike Pound
As a former network engineer, even though Arista/Cisco/Juniper get all the attention, Netgear unmanaged switches are the unsung heroes of scientific research :)
indeed 🙂
Meh, Netgear :/
That's an interesting thought. Those 5 port blue boxes are all over the place, under desks, strapped to walls, lashed to machinery, warehouses...
It used to be Netgear. Over 10 years ago I moved to MikroTik.
Don’t forget Ubiquiti
The second he said "risk assessment" I knew he wasn't happy with it, that man has a lot of ideas and maybe 10% of them he can actually do...
I feel you friend.
The struggle is real heh
Yea felt that one as well. Heard that Lex Freedman was really disappointed about this as well. Every university is basically doing so stringent risk assessment and PR management that you loose out on interactions between humans and robots. Probably the most important part of these robots. Unsure how exact that statement is, so take that with a big grain of salt. But hopefully we will see more interactions in coming future.
The U.K. has no shortage of officious twits.
@@Torwals No, they are robots, machines, bits and bytes and they are not meant to interact much with humans - no matter how pet-like they might look or behave.
Those 'behaviours' are programmed mostly for show and while collision control is part of the robot, if set up incorrectly or you are not recognised as an obstacle, the machine will try to walk through you and it will not back down. It has no understanding of your screams or that you want to push it away to prevent some danger.
@@PH4RX damn... sounds like a cool movie plot
OctoMap is probably one of the best 3D occupancy grid mapping ROS library.
I could see later versions used for mapping out dangerous environments and search and rescue.
The Boston Dynamics St. Bernard?
search and rescue is one of the more noble reasons I could see this being used for...
I have done a project with my colleagues back in Japan doing exactly that.
They should make one that finds empty cups on the floor and pisses beer into them, that would be sick
Based comment. I knew it I'll find Pissbot's references here 😂
Why wouldn't you just build cup holders onto it, and then just have the robot filled with a small "keg"?
I think some 3ft American man had a similar idea
And name it "Corny"?
Pissbot FTW
Crackbaby did it first.
this is very interesting - not too many places where you can find how the robot creates the internal 3D maps to autonavigate - thanks for doing this!
Emacs key bindings in vim- I see you! Powerful nerd energy! 👊
For years I used a vi emulator in emacs.
Hahaha! 🙌👍🏻
@@tfofurn Do i hear evil mode?
The surface decoration of those cupboards is lovely.
Very neatly explained. Thank you for making this video. Ros is the defacto middle ware for robotics today. And that visualization tool is rviz which was also developed by the ros community for monitoring sensor data and robot kinematics.
more videos on ROS would be awesome! showing off RViz and MoveIt and gazebo and virtual camera sensors and and and
As someone learning ROS currently (well, ROS2) I second this.
Nice job on ROS1, now switch to ROS2 since you are using wifi and emulate a harsh environnement :)
I asked the Boston Dynamics people if they could create a robot ostrich with the technology they have now.
They said, no, but they could make an emulator.
They actually have one, it de palletises boxes
I very much enjoy the animation of spot at 1:29
I worked on autonomous frontier exploration and mapping, but there we squashed down the point cloud into a 2D occupancy map.
Hadn't heard of an octomap before (which is essentially a 3D occupancy map), really cool stuff!
But can it pee beer into a cup?
No, that is the pissbot 9000
maybe...
Micheal reeves hhh
Ex-Velodyne LiDAR employee here… we used to have one of these in our San Jose office!!
I’m doing a Mechatronics (robot engineering) degree and it’s great to see what I may be doing in the future
It should definitely squat it's rear end to make it's breadcrumb deposits, and for no reason at all circle the dropping 3 times then momentarily lifting a leg in it's direction before proudly trotting off on it's tasks
please consider doing a video on ROS
0:36 ..... So, your saying I CAN'T ride it around?? 😂
Also, 0:58 What kind of rubber bumpers ... Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers? LOL
😂😂 10 points to you sir
It is the most closeup video with spot
I love the ethics of this, pretending it's for mapping.
Cute.
nice. i have too started working on bots recently. very interesting
Sounds like the ideal power plant robot. As long as you put an arm or two on it to disassemble things. Or perhaps in the not to distant future in autonomous shipping.
"And after the mapping stuff is all worked out we just strap guns and deadly lasers on it, and voilà!"
For that see Samsung 😂
Please, a full video just on the popped collar.
It quite aligns with the reasearch that we are doing. Would you mind pointing me towards the resources such as the tools, software and algorithm that you are using? Basically, we have remote driven bipedal robot and we are trying to do a automatic navigation just like shown in the video.
Could you also talk about other robots in the same style as Spot, such as Unitree A1, ANYmal or Q-UGVS?
Using a 5 port poe switch to power one poe wifi mesh adapter seems a bit silly. But maybe it's to be able to easily connect with it via wire for debugging etc.
Sounds like the ideal power plant robot. As long as you put an arm or two on the robot to disassemble things.
As a follow-up on this video, it might also be interesting to discuss RoboCup?
Yes, these will definitely make all our lives richer and more meaningful.
Now make it pee beer
Nice
Spot has mutliple Lidars already for navigation. Is it too difficult to extract data from those? No API's?
I imagine their lidar has a wider FOV more suited for mapping compared to the one for object detection/avoidance.
Yeah, and also surely a walking bot has accelerometers inbuilt too, right?
@@eaglestdogg That still seems incredibly wasteful. Why not have the bot look around itself using the front-facing lidars? It's a gradual autonomous mapper, not a fast-moving car that needs 360-degree vision in milliseconds to avoid fatal collisions with people
@@gloverelaxis It would have to constantly be spinning 360 while also tilting up and down as well, that's going to be incredibly slow surely.
@@gloverelaxis that’s the IMU part yes.
The guy in the background doing the clock 🙋♂💁♂⏰
I saw that too lol, I think that was Robo dogs last victim
Segway had a project called Centurion, which was a 4 wheeled project with great torque. They should take away the operater, add a upper half robot and call it Centaur. Just a long lost idea that could happen now.
I like the heart on your sleeve tat
What about using PY2C to generate a C++ which can be compiled and then linked into the system and will run smoother and faster.
So people really are reinventing the dog
Vim for the win!
Here's a task they could try with it, follow people within a designated area, this would happen when either it or a director deems someone as suspicious when being used for security
How about no
Straight out of Black Mirror, though a little less weaponised and a bit slower.
Vim with emacs keybinding, oh my
Isn't there a lot of redundant work done? Spot generates a 3D map of the ambient world anyways, yet they choose to generate their own and use that. Also they try to control the navigation on their own, when Spot knows how to move in an environment better than them (automatically avoids obstacles in a path, etc.).
I'd like to see animals interacting with this.
These dudes have basically invented their own low-level, sensor based, Kafka 😊
Ahh, the first generation of the human killing robot. So deadly that it has to be kept under control at all times, lest it run gets out and goes on a killing spree, one shin at a time.
Me and my friends would've killed robot dog with hammers i can tell you that much
@@pepsimilkhotel it aint that easy fam
RoboDog would see your intention and jump 10 meters to arrive on top of your head
6:24 now why does that remind me of money for nothing? :-)
12:38 "a subscriber-publisher thing" you mean like MQTT?
Yes, ROS's communications systems are similar to mqtt, but does not have a broker. The master gives the information needed to the node to contact other nodes directly. You can also choose between three types of message format.
Topics: publish and forget
Service: request something and wait for the result
Action: contiuous feedback to the client and can can also handle pause, cancel and similar.
"...long term angle..." meaning "...we want to fit it with weapons and send it to warzones..."
Why aren't they using spot's cameras?
I think that thing on top is just a fun hat.
What's that handheld computer on the table at 9:24? It's not the Steam Deck, I wonder if it's one of the competitors.
The portable XBox? lol
8:30 What’s the music on the wall behind Michal?
And why's that guy in the background pretending to be a clock?
The looks of the program RViz, it looks like it's done with the Qt framework. Is it right?
Iirc it's a ROS package and yes, it is indeed qt. All ROS GUI tools are qt
1:19 - Spot's front-ear? 🤣
wheres the money coming from? :O very nice set, for not a lot of progress..
He talks and talks but doesn't demonstrate that big red button that every viewer is staring at.
The “that was easy” staples military button? For ppl that get close enough unwittingly press it thinking it’s a shutdown, but it’s a nerve agent release 😮😂
This video is just a deleted scene from that Black Mirror's episode
When will robots be able to use "eyeballs" (aka passive detectors)?
What is passive about eyeballs?
@@punkdigerati they are receptors.
exospot when
make it flip
Kafka evolved - iirc the original one only had two legs :-)
NUC, Next unit of computation - w8 isn't this just like a raspy?
More powerful, but yeah. ROS will run on a Pi just nicely too, but you're more limited with the amount of processing.
More like a Jetson Xavier NX
If I ever saw one of these, I'd just pick it up and walk away.
Engineer your way out of that lol.
Vim not Emacs? Blimey!
‘Vim is the easiest thing I know to use’ wtf who is this guy and where did he come from?
I didn't know Aj Styles was a programmer
wow a robot vacuum on legs ;-)
bhadiya
"Risk assessment?!" Geez...
Hey! It acts like a glorified ROMBA vacuum cleaner without the vacuum part.
Remember this day when one of these is chasing you down the street.
All that tech and they're using a dity cheap uncased eBay Chinese DC/DC converter of dubious quality.
akash,
ROS and middleware make sense for rapid, high-end development, but I really would not trust a safety system going through a non-deterministic system. Even real-time OS doesn't really cut it to me. If it can hurt a human (or even equipment) if it fails, then it should be going through an embedded controller or FPGA. Tough pill to swallow though.
Do you have any sources that prove that FPGAs or hardware-based control are safer or more reliable than properly tested and redundant software control. Genuinely curious, not trying to say you're wrong :)
Actual safety-rated robots using ROS exist already and are deployed around the world.
To meet the safety ratings there's always a lower-level system that can cut power to the motors, even if the software crashes. Prominent e-stop buttons, wireless e-stops, safety lidar, etc. All use those sorts of very low-level circuitry as a backstop for the software in case a problem occurs.
@@JohnWalz97 It's a simple question with a big answer. On one side there is the computer science concept of deterministic computing. The definition of Turing Complete and the Halting Problem to see why risk assessment of code on general purpose computers is difficult to accurately assess.
On the other side there is the umbrella of reliability engineering: specifically safety systems and even more specifically safety-critical systems. There are formal definitions of risk assessment methodologies and acceptable levels of probability of events (the wikipedia page on safety-critical systems links the specs and the specs have the methodologies and limits).
The issue arises when trying to assign a probability of an event to a general purpose computer. How do you prove the reliability of your code? Even if you do, how do you prove the reliability of an entire operating system? Therein lies the problem. Even robust real-time operating systems are too complicated to reasonably prove reliability. There are millions of ways a non-halting state could be entered, in which case your control state machine no longer gets executed. A deterministic computer (PLC, FPGA, DSP, embedded controller, etc) has no operating system.
Unfortunately I do not know of any papers that explicitly highlight the combination of these facts, but you will find hundreds of papers trying to propose solutions to this problem, which implies it. Search for "non deterministic safety system".
@@willis936 you want to study Control Theory
@@cedricvillani8502 You want to study reliability engineering.
Next time use a m1 Mac mini for the external brains… saves on battery
Almost as advanced as pissbot
Not entirely sure how to feel about this video... I have a general loathing for all things Boston Dynamics, yet this seems to perhaps genuinely be a usage that has other goals than just military ones? So... that's kinda cool. And yet, I can also easily see how this could be used for military purposes, so.... yeah. Conflicted feelings... glad I actually watched, and yet...... :-|
All technology has military uses. Literally all of it
But I want to pet the robot.
it will bite
Are those people associated with Boston Dynamics? If so, it seems a bit underwhelming the entire Kit. Needs a lot of work before it justifies the 80k pricetag
Emacs bindings lol wtf bro?
...No K9 sticker...bummer
You know, don't you, that this ends with the final, desperate remnants of humanity being chased through the woods.
hopefully
@@vectoralphaAI tf is wrong with you
@@vectoralphaAI Imagine adding a checkmark to your name, even though verifying your account is so easy nowadays that countless spambots have checkmarks. You're just humiliating yourself in front of the bots. No wonder -humanity gets wiped in the future- *we can coexist peacefully with artificial lifeforms.*
"get a robot to walk around doing instructions" ...or just put some IOT capable fixed sensors where you need to take readings, much cheaper option
Michael did it better but nice job
This robot might be Useful for very niche application. For most things we can use drones.
Spot is a drone. But, I'd be interested to know how a flying robot could map a mine or collapsed building. What's great about a Spot robot is its ability to navigate through places where it's necessary to also interact with the environment by opening doors for instance. Also, it doesn't consume a ton of power to just remain in one place the way a flying drone would need to do. And, weight of payloads is not nearly as constrained. Try putting a 10 kilo payload on a quad-coper to map a nuclear accident. The lead shielding alone would be prohibitively expensive, weight-wise.
any autonomous bot is a drone. you generally don't need to fly indoors; it's a massive waste of energy
@@WmSrite-pi8ck thats why I said niche. To your point we can build hybrid drone or jet powered which can carry more weight weight and can be more nimble. Especially Considering the development cost and time for this (which is billions and more than a decade).
@@gloverelaxis energy is abundant (in this context). It's about nimble ness and total coverage of usecase
@@skytech2501 Hmm I hadn't considered the idea that you're a moron. And, yet...
*I'm watching from Kalam valley*
Calling Merrick Garland.... These things will be able to make quick work of political enemies.
Don't know why that research project requires legs, other than the dog being donated.
anthropomorphising surveillance equipment surely must be a new low for humanity
Biomimicry is a valid strategy for design.
The scariest thing about these is that the US military has ordered these but with essentially rifles strapped on top of them.
Aren't robots like this already being used for police monitoring capabilities in New York?
I think there was a pilot program, yes.
Gas detection?
With exposed connectors?
FAIL!
That's how they used to do it in the early 1800s before the safety lamp. Someone would go into a mine with a candle on a stick, wearing wet clothes for protection. If an explosion went off, he had to duck.
@@BenOliver999 Yes. That is why it was universally changed!
automated war crimes
He’s creepy & looks to be part of the dystopian future
I like it
What other sort of future were you expecting?
These advances are great and all, but how long until someone finds a way to make Spot not look like an unnerving headless abomination?
It's forward planning for halloween - all they need is luminous paint and sound effects
The headed abomination looked even more unnerving.
Why does his voice go up at the end of every sentence. Sounds like everything is a question even when it isn't. I can't stand to listen to him.
That's called uptalk
LOL you think we'll watch a video of masked people.
The Woke Saftey snow flakes is the reason why we cant do funs things anymore.