Robot from Boston Dynamics totally eats it during demo
A robot fail usually sends shockwaves throughout the internet, but a Boston Dynamics demo that went awry last month is just now getting a reaction.
At the annual Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders at UMass Lowell, Boston Dynamics presented its humanoid robot, Atlas, performing cool tricks on stage. The video is above.
All went fairly smoothly at the demo with Atlas picking up a box and dealing with the taunts from SpotMini, a four-legged robot, introduced later in the demo.
It wasn't until the final bow that Atlas stumbled -- literally. While walking off stage, the robot tripped over a light projector and fell behind the curtain. It was definitely not a planned fall. In the ultimate upstaging, SpotMini gracefully sauntered off after the tumble.
The fail happened more than a month ago with the YouTube video posted July 2, but it spread after Reddit and The Next Web got wind of it. Somehow Boston Dynamics was spared the immediate online ridicule that comes with this type of thing--especially impressive considering it was in front of a huge group of high school students with their phones out.
The robotics company was sold from Google to the Japanese company Softbank earlier this year, just before the robot fall.
Topics Artificial Intelligence
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
