IHMC's ATLAS Robot Learning to Do Some Chores

Since their flawless (well, almost flawless) second place finish at the DRC Finals, Team IHMC has been keeping their ATLAS robot busy. Because if you have a multi-million dollar robot from the U.S. Government, you might as well get it to sweep up your Nerf darts with a broom. We spoke with John Carff, ATLAS robot operator at IHMC, about what was going on behind the scenes in this video (which, by the way, you're watching at 20x normal speed). Our first question was why the heck IHMC is teaching ATLAS to clean house, and sadly, the answer is not "because we're about to announce the availability of that robot butler you've always wanted." Rather, it's because ATLAS needs to be run often to make sure that code updates don't break anything, and running the same tasks (like DRC tasks) over and over again gets boring.