BOSTON – If you’ve ever seen video of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot in action and though it was unsettling, wait till you see what the mechanical marvel can do now.
The robotics company’s latest video shows the battery-powered robot has moved beyond jogging and performing backflips and is now basically doing parkour, the obstacle course fitness regimen developed by special forces soldiers.
In the video posted to the company’s YouTube channel Thursday, the Atlas robot can be seen jumping over a log and gracefully zigzagging its way up a series of boxes about 16 inches high.
There’s nothing particularly terrifying about the robot’s movements, but some YouTube viewers found the video to be a cause for concern.
“Notice the humans are no longer present in the video. The robots probably murdered them all,” said one viewer. “Please stop making Terminators,” another said.
Boston Dynamics has a different take on their creation. “This robot’s [purpose] is really to drive innovation inside our group, to push us to understand how to marry controls on complex machines,” V.P. of Engineering, Aaron Saunders said in an interview earlier this year. “It is also to create an impression of what robots can do.”
