BigDog Overview (Updated March 2010)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as the go-to demo of robot resilience when Boston Dynamics comes up.
What it is
Boston Dynamics' 2010 demo of BigDog, a quadruped robot that climbs through woods, recovers from kicks, slips on ice and jogs at 5 mph. It was an early showcase of dynamic legged locomotion.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2012 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Recommends sjtrny · 2015-02 · on “Boston Dynamics' New Robot – Spot”
> Can it get up if knocked over? Yes [LINK] . > Just how resilient is it? Watch it on ice [this video] I assumed the HN crowd had already seen all these videos.
Cites Retric · 2012-06 · on “Google & Stanford create a digital brain that learns to identify a human face”
Let's say you want to build a robot that walks around like a person or even a goat. There are basically two part's of that problem, building the hardware, and building the software. If you use neural networks for the software then it's going to take more resources to run, and take a while to train. However, while people may be able to write more efficient software that requires fewer resources developing that software is going to take longer and cost a lot more money. [this video] The idea that I can create software which works even if I don't understand why it works is a powerful idea. The point of AI as a field is stepping back and saying: "Computers are fast and cheap, people are slow and expe
Cites SmileyKeith · 2013-12 · on “Google Acquires Boston Dynamics”
Having just watched this video[0] of some of their work this stuff is just amazing. I can't wait to see what Google does with it. Also this is what makes Google such an awesome company from a computer science perspective IMO. [0]: [this video]
Cites cabalamat · 2013-12 · on “The rise of robots and the future of jobs”
It says in the article that Big Dog is a robot made by a company Google bought. Here's a video: [this video]
Cites davidw · 2015-04 · on “Gotchas from Two Years with Node”
> At any given time there’s only a single running code block. > But here… there be dragons. That's one of the things Erlang solves pretty well. Sometimes I sort of envision it as that robot dog/mule thing that they keep kicking and it gets back up and keeps going. [this video] if you have never seen it before.
Cites blacksmith_tb · 2018-05 · on “Boston Dynamics will start selling its dog-like SpotMini robot in 2019”
The Big Dog has an internal combustion engine (what I take to be an electrical generator) that is about as loud as a chainsaw[1]. SpotMini makes servo noises, but it's all-electric, and quite a bit less noisy. 1: [this video]