Watch amazing robots fall over at the DARPA Robotics Challenge! (And see the winner.)

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That last one looked like it was seizing or had Parkinson’s. Poor little guy.

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A falling-over competition? That’s a bit Monty Python, isn’t it?

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Two legs bad, four legs good!

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Moravec’s funniest home videos?

Robot soccer/football can be amusing.

Those DARPA bots, on the other hand, just look like sad drunks.

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I had a servo controller who got an epileptic fit when trying to move too fast.

The power supply was not sufficient. If the motor went full-power, it pulled the voltage down enough that the microcontroller reset, and sent a control pulse in a different timing. The servo then tried to go to a new position, also on full power, and the cycle repeated until I either cut the power or the random position commands went close enough that the power had chance to recover.

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Ouch. I was reading about the robots falling over, but I assumed it was on uneven, treacherous terrain, not on flat, hard surfaces. DARPA’s “Grand Challenge” was a hilarious disaster (cars not starting, not able to drive more than ten feet without crashing, etc.) and ten years later we’ve got autonomous vehicles on the road. I wonder if the same will be true here. I kind of suspect not, given what I’ve been reading about the walls being run into in humanoid robots development.

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This covers only a fraction of the falls. Hercules’ fatal fall on exiting the vehicle was the most gruesome, involving a mighty crash (it’s a Boston Dynamics monster body) and spurting of robot blood:

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I wonder how Asimo would have fared with some of these tasks? It can climb stairs fairly well, pick up and manipulate objects…

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Hmm, seems like Asimo isn’t entirely autonomous and possibly not strong enough.

The slightest hint of a giggle may be enough for you to be tortured forever by Roko’s Basilisk

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My future simulation can go phuck him “self”…

The robots fall down so easily because they are ugly. Their appearance is a worn-out cliché out of 1950s pulp fiction. They are probably trying to kill themselves.

If you want robots to walk, run, dance, fly, build beautiful robots.

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