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Okay, that’s not exactly what happened, but Google-owned Boston Dynamics has released a new video of the latest incarnation of their Atlas robot, showcasing it’s capabilities for balance, navigating rough terrain, handling objects, and even getting back up after being knocked over. And all of this is accomplished while the robot is untethered.

Slimmed down to a 180-lb, 5’9" — quite svelte compared to it’s previous 6-foot form — the video shows the new Atlas model leaving the office to take a stroll through the snowy woods, using LiDAR and stereo cameras to "avoid obstacles, assess the terrain, help with navigation and manipulate objects".
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In 1920 Czech writer Karel Kapek wrote a science-fiction play whose title translated into English as Rossum’s Universal Robots or R.U.R. When it premiered in 1921, it introduced the word ‘Robot’ to the English language and to the science fiction genre. By 1923, it had been translated into 30 languages.

The robots in R.U.R. are closer in nature to cyborgs or androids. Manufactured from synthetic organic materials and capable of independent thought, they are at first content to serve the humans they so closely resemble – but ultimately rebel and wipe them out as useless impediments to their own existence.
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With the help of a smart tablet and Angry Birds, children can now do something typically reserved for engineers and computer scientists: program a robot to learn new skills. The Georgia Institute of Technology project is designed to serve as a rehabilitation tool and to help kids with disabilities.

The researchers have paired a small humanoid robot with an Android tablet. Kids teach it how to play Angry Birds, dragging their finger on the tablet to whiz the bird across the screen. In the meantime, the robot watches what happens and records “snapshots” in its memory.read more

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The study of evolutionary patterns has received a helping hand from technology, in the form of a small colony of rampant robots.

Using robotic subjects, it was possible to accelerate the trends that drive evolution allowing thousands of years of generational progressions to be condensed into just a matter of days.
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