Humanoid robot walks through a forest like it's no big thing

As Robert Frost once almost said, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I outrun this robot."

With apologies to the late great poet, there is no other way to react to the sight of a six-foot-tall robot gingerly making its way through dense woods with only a power cable to sustain it.

By now, we have seen robots manage man-made obstacle courses, leap over hurdles like gazelles and fight controlled fires, but we've rarely seen them out in the wild.

Boston Dynamic's bipedal Atlas robot (a good number of the robots in the recent DARPA competition were based on it), however, has now followed in the footsteps of its big brother, the aptly-named Big Dog, which has also handled Mother Nature's terrain. Even so, the task is doubly difficult when you have just two legs Read more...