If you thought robot dogs were the coolest animatronic animals out there, prepare to think again. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, a company better known for its high-end motorcycles, has unveiled a hydrogen-powered, ride-on robo-horse. The bizarre device was unveiled at the Osaka Kansai Expo on April 4 as part of Kawasaki's'Impulse to Move' project. Dubbed the CORLEO, this two-seater quadruped is capable of galloping over almost any terrain. The company calls it a'revolutionary off-road personal mobility vehicle' which swaps out the familiar wheels for four robotic legs. To steer, all you need to do is move your body and the machine's AI vision will pick out the best route to take.

We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our bodies could collide with telepresence robots, mobility aids, and a quadruped robot. Based on our findings, we employed soma trajectories to analyse collisions as extended experiences that negotiate key transitions of consent, preparation, launch, contact, ripple, sting, untangle, debris and reflect. We then employed these ideas to analyse two collision experiences, an accidental collision between a person and a drone, and the deliberate design of a robot to play with cats, revealing how real-world collisions involve the complex and ongoing entanglement of soma trajectories. We discuss how viewing collisions as entangled trajectories, or tangles, can be used analytically, as a design approach, and as a lens to broach ethical complexity.

Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics, gave the world a menagerie of two- and four-legged machines capable of jaw-dropping parkour, infectious dance routines, and industrious shelf stacking. Raibert is now looking to lead a revolution in robot intelligence as well as acrobatics. And he says that recent advances in machine learning have accelerated his robots' ability to learn how to perform difficult moves without human help. "The hope is that we'll be able to produce lots of behavior without having to handcraft everything that robots do," Raibert told me recently. Boston Dynamics might have pioneered legged robots, but it's now part of a crowded pack of companies offering robot dogs and humanoids.

The growing use of autonomous mobile service robots (AMSRs) in dynamic environments requires flexible management of compute resources to optimize the performance of diverse tasks such as navigation, localization, perception, and so on. Current robot deployments, which oftentimes rely on static configurations (of the OS, applications, etc.) and system over-provisioning, fall short since they do not account for the tasks' performance variations resulting in poor system-wide behavior such as robot instability and/or inefficient resource use. This paper presents ConfigBot, a system designed to adaptively reconfigure AMSR applications to meet a predefined performance specification by leveraging runtime profiling and automated configuration tuning. Through experiments on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot equipped with NVIDIA AGX Orin, we demonstrate ConfigBot's efficacy in maintaining system stability and optimizing resource allocation across diverse scenarios. Our findings highlight the promise of tailored and dynamic configurations for robot deployments.

U.S.-based Boston Dynamics' Spot is distinguishedly the market leader regarding these robots. Interesting Engineering has previously reported on many of Spot's antics and cuteness. Through videos such as the one shared above, Unitree is also looking to pique the cuteness quotient of its offerings. However, there are many other reasons why one could pick a Unitree robotic dog. Unitree's robotic dog, Go1, does not boast bright colors and only has a silvery metallic appearance.

For starters, it has no head. And instead of kibble and water, it runs on a lithium-ion battery. When the four-legged robot, which can climb stairs, open doors and transmit 360-degree video, was unveiled a few years ago, it was billed as a potent new tool for industries whose workers are often in dangerous conditions. It could, for example, detect radiation for an energy company or inspect the safety of a mining tunnel, its creator, Boston Dynamics, touted said in promotional material. And police officials around the U.S. realized Spot, which its inventors named, also offered an upgrade from the slower, less agile robots currently used in hostage situations, assessing suspicious packages and other high-risk situations.

If we want to train robots in simulation before deploying them in reality, it seems natural and almost self-evident to presume that reducing the sim2real gap involves creating simulators of increasing fidelity (since reality is what it is). We challenge this assumption and present a contrary hypothesis -- sim2real transfer of robots may be improved with lower (not higher) fidelity simulation. We conduct a systematic large-scale evaluation of this hypothesis on the problem of visual navigation -- in the real world, and on 2 different simulators (Habitat and iGibson) using 3 different robots (A1, AlienGo, Spot). Our results show that, contrary to expectation, adding fidelity does not help with learning; performance is poor due to slow simulation speed (preventing large-scale learning) and overfitting to inaccuracies in simulation physics. Instead, building simple models of the robot motion using real-world data can improve learning and generalization.

Boston Dynamics has released an incredible video of a troupe its famous Spot robotic dogs pulling off some very impressive dance moves. Seven of the robots can be seen performing a choreographed routine to the hit song'Permission to Dance', by K-Pop band BTS. Initially, one dog appears to'sing' the solo parts of the songs by grasping its robotic arm in time to the words, while the others step in the background. When the chorus kicks in, they begin a series of synchronised moves in different formations, as if they were the boy band themselves. There is even a cameo from Atlas, a six-foot-tall bipedal humanoid robot also developed by the Boston-based firm, who jumps and claps to the beat.