Watch: Atlas, this humanoid robot can now do a perfect backflip after a gymnastic routine
The Boston Dynamics robot has been acquiring navigational skills steadily since its ‘birth’ in 2013.
After walking and climbing, what’s the next thing a robot should learn to do? Backflips, obviously.
And so, meet Atlas. One of the robots developed by Boston Dynamics – owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company – it can not only perform a simple gymnastic routine that involves jumping on and down from platforms and doing 180-degree twists, it can also end the routine with a perfect blackflip.
Just like humans, Atlas didn’t get it right first time, but it got there eventually, as the video above shows. Created in 2013, the robot has been through several development cycles, as you can see in the videos below. The first is from 2013, when Atlas was just learning to balance on a rough terrain, while the second is from early 2016, when the humanoid had just learned to avoid obstacles, navigate, open doors, lift objects and stack them, and pick itself up from the floor.