Cool video. That is an impressive range of motion and balance. Certainly capable of short range patrol/scouting.
1. I am curious what the battery capacity is. How long can they move around like that without recharge?
2. How many man-hours did it take to program that dance sequence?
1. The Spot dog-robots only have a battery life of about 90 minutes. I assume the bipedal Boston Dynamic robots are about the same. Maybe less.
2. Probably a lot. Since the dance moves required specific limb positions and not just "Do 'A' and move to point 'B'" and let the software/neural nets figure out how to do it in realtime.
Battery capacity is really one of the big limiting factors for these robots, figure if someone comes up with a commercially viable replacement for Lithium Ion, and say it is double the capacity, that Spot robot now only has a 3 hour runtime, which still isn't super long. I'd imagine that the wheeled robots do a lot better because they don't have the weight and balance limitations that the legged robots do, so they can carry heavier/larger batteries.
And it's kind of funny, but the one thing that Sci-Fi gets right is when the energy cells of various devices are used as ersatz bombs (like Phasers set to "overload" in Star Trek) they're actually pretty accurate. Because something with that much energy potential in it does start to resemble a bomb at some point. Even existing Lithium Ion batteries are pretty spicy when they go wrong.
And while they're impressive, I still don't really know what the two legged bipedal robots are "for". The four legged robots handle random/rough terrain well. The wheeled robots do well in built up spaces. And robots that actually get used en-masse are either fixed arms, or things like automated forklifts that are purpose built in their specific task to the form.
I get that bipedal humanoid robots are designed to work and navigate in "human spaces" since we're bipedal and obviously humanoid, but I still don't quite get what work they're going to do. An agriculture robot is going to look like a tractor without a cab. Or be a spraying drone. We already know what most factory robots look like.
Housekeeping and maid service is the main thing I can think of, because it requires manipulating human objects in a human space. And the software challenges of dealing with a room full of random clutter, determining what's garbage, and what should be put away or straightened up are daunting to say the least.
