Inspiring or decadent? Poetic or vulgar? Liberating or threatening? Friends or enemies? Machines or companions? Robots have fascinated mankind even long before they adopted that name and when the image we’ve of them today wasn’t even a fantasy. In ancient Greece, they invented human-shaped mechanical machines that served wine and something similar had China in past. In contemporary history, they need to accompany us in some ways, although the general public knows them less for his or their scientific details and more as legends formed within the heart of popular culture, literature, and film.
From Mary Shelley’s humanoid robot in Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s wonderful stories in me, Robot, including his endearing Bicentennial Man, was later embodied in the film by Robin Williams. On the list is the lovable Robotina from The Jetsons, the well-known R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars, or maybe the courageous TARS from Interstellar. References to robots as a chimera that blow the human mind are countless and range from the lovable to the terrifying. Regarding the latter, it’s enough to recollect the dictatorship of machines within the Matrix, which turns what remains of humanity into thermal batteries, or the omnipresent HAL 9000 from 2001 an area Odyssey.
The historical tour might be far more lengthy. Terminator, Wall-E, the bartender from Back to the longer term III, the synthetic Intelligence little boy, the Transformers, Baymax from Big Heroes, Bender from Futurama. And then we arrive in 2020, a weird year from starting to end that had as a corollary on December 29 the diffusion of a viral video during which four real robots, made with state-of-the-art technology, dance in perfect choreography to rock and roll from 1962, does one love me, a Mowtown song by The Contours that audiences may remember as a part of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.
Those who have seen it pulse with two qualifiers that predominate: tender and chilling. The packaging is that the same popular culture as always, but the background isn’t a fantasy but the foremost absolute portrait of a tremendous reality. Influencers and super powerful. Many of the 25 million people that so far have seen the video to which we refer didn’t know Atlas, Spot, and Handle, the emblematic characters of the American company Boston Dynamic, a robotics laboratory born within the Institute of Massachusetts Technology (MIT), bought by Google in 2013, sold in 2017 to SoftBank Japanese and now, acquired just a couple of days ago by Hyundai Koreans.
The trio we mentioned constitutes the foremost advanced robots within the world unless it’s known. Certainly, their choreographic video went viral, but they’re already influencers. Footage of those characters is everywhere on YouTube and shows them performing all types of tasks, parkours, and physical prowess challenges. All are inspired by sorts of nature. Atlas may be a quite humanoid that moves with hydraulic functions; Spot is “a dog” with superpowers; and Handle maybe a warehouse assistant with a silhouette like an ostrich, or perhaps a kiwi, that exotic bird that can’t fly because it’s no wings.
All three robots have an extraordinary mobility and agility capabilities. the foremost impressive to seem at is that the Atlas, which thanks to its great resemblance to our species gives the impression of being a Robocop without a shell; But the foremost brilliant in terms of skills and usefulness is Spot, which is sold as a pet or assistant at the modest price of $ 75, currently works as a watchman at the Chernobyl atomic power plant and, as a serious professional achievement, was selected to steer in the herd on NASA’s upcoming unmanned mission to Mars.
A spot2 to the Mars. It seems like the premise of a movie. Before receiving humans, Mars is going to be conquered by a terrestrial pack of robot dogs; to raised specify, from a herd of Spots, which in its astronaut and recharged version are going to be called Au-Spot. The project was announced in December at the American Geophysical Union AGU annual conference, during which NASA researchers participated.
The idea is straightforward. While it’s true that the rovers that have exploded Mars thus far are capable of moving across the surface, they’re limited thereto surface. they can’t enter caves easily and don’t have equivalent maneuverability as devices like Spot. So why not equip a Spot-like dog with AI and sensors of various kinds to venture into those unexplored corners? it’s right there where the prototype that’s already within the training phase comes into play.
So far, Spot has already been proven as a construction helper, as a scout on all types of terrain, carrying weight, and tracking spaces sort of a hound. you’ll do all this alone, and once you add a herd you’ve got the power to coordinate collective actions. Meanwhile, on February 18. Before the Au-Spots arrive on Mars, the history of the exploration of the neighboring planet will open a replacement chapter with the arrival of Perseverance, the explorer robot that left Earth in mid-2019 and is already within the final phase of your trip.
The reason for his trip to Mars is to look for all times or traces of microbial life within the lower layers of the bottom and for that he will excavate, collect samples take photographs and even fly a drone overhead in what is going to be the primary Earth flight in Martian territory. Perseverance just like the remainder of the robots that have reached Mars, won’t return to Earth. it’ll leave the organized samples awaiting a rescue mission which will perhaps continue in 2031. It looks like a too long-term project to look exciting, but that’s how these sorts of ventures work that involve resources and technology so vast.
Meanwhile, the video of the dancing robots continues to accumulate not only visits but parodies. a really particular one that’s also on the thanks to going viral replaces the song of The Contours with one composed especially for the group of dancers, during which they supposedly sing verses in binary language. The comments reveal what they assert in infinite mixtures of ones and zeros we’ll conquer them by dancing. The spotted dog was selected to travel to Mars for its extraordinary capabilities of exploration and herding.
