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- Hacker News
- Very cool tech, but don’t want one of these things coming after meby nickandbro
- I tried Unitree qugv and they were garbage, not so sure about this oneby tamimio
- when can i hop on its back and ride it like an all-terrain ultra-longboard?
- Looks like right now. They had an image of it with three small Asian men standing on it. I believe I’ve seen a previous video of this with a guy actually riding it. It should still be on their YouTube channel.by dyauspitr
- how is this robot seems to have perfect traction ?
its either rolls perfectly without traction or walks uphill with perfect traction ?
is it AI generated video or did they make some groundbreaking success ?
or is it just promo video, showing future potential, not yet developed capabilities ?
by bijowo1676 - It doesn't have perfect traction. It stumbles in the videos. This is consistent with other wheeled robots that have come out the last few years.by doug_durham
- Here -and with every product promo video - you are watching curated shots. Non-flattering footage simply will get deleted during edit, except perhaps for the blooper-reel, if that's the company coldly calculates to present a goofy, non-threatening vibe.by overfeed
- If I understand your question correctly, I think you may be missing that it can lock the wheels so they don’t roll sometimes like when it’s climbing uphill.by dyauspitr
- This thing reminds me of something out of Death stranding, Hideo Kojima was way ahead of his time
- You might also say that about Terry Pratchett… see Twoflower and The Luggage.by jimmcslim
- I want to see it performing in sand or in very dry soil environment too. They didn't show that in these videos.by smusamashah
- I imagine it ought to be possible to use computer vision to augment the traction control system, all the way up to locking the wheels altogether and using them as feet wherever necessary.
Even if the AS2-W isn't capable of doing that today, it's a fairly obvious goal for future development given how generally useful wheels are otherwise.
by roryirvine - I'd love to see an ebike-like vehicle in this spirit. Meant to be ridden, self-balancing, and all-terrain capable.
- Seems like that would significantly raise the center-of-gravity making it less stable?by aidenn0
- I think you've just nearly described the 'Chevaline' mechanical horses in The Diamond Age, but without the nanotechby walrus01
- Despite being mocked by Henry Ford decades ago, we'll finally get our 'better horse'!by gorjusborg
- Impressive … and scary. Why is it that this company is moving so fast when others like Boston Dynamics don’t seem to have made much progress?by SilverElfin
- You are assuming this thing is real and not just a web page.by wffurr
- There's no use for these robots(even militarily). It's very high tech, but that's it.by numpad0
- Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of.
On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.
by saturn8601 - They never give you dev access without paying like 10x the price.by arjie
- Interesting, you can’t use their SDK or you can’t load whatever you want on it?by syntaxing
- I love 4 leg robots with wheels because it is a form of locomotion that evolution didn't create and seems to be wildly effective with the wheels allowing for very fast movement on smooth surfaces and the legs acting like a suspension with huge travel range on rough surfaces and then it can switch to walking mode with the wheels acting like ankles. And they can step over obstacles or step up to higher surfaces.by UltraSane
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8WuXDXfcI
relevant link.
I remember watching this video with the takeaway: if you want it secure, build it yourself... which is what I am currently doing.
by altruios - We need open source versions of these.
1. We need the capability to build the servos, actuators, etc. Supply chain, factories, specialized vendors.
2. We need to dump the firmware, decompile it, extract the models, and liberate it all. AI will help immensely with that. We can literally hijack everything software that isn't delivered over cloud now - so this is the easy part. We can then fine tune, adapt to new tasks, etc. Grabbing the brain = easy.
So the hard part is the hardware itself. The brain will belong to us soon enough.
Robotics distillation will be a big thing. You won't even have to farm out billions of requests across residential gateways. You just need to buy one unit.
You can't stop the software from becoming open.
Startup idea: AI model to dump the firmware from DJI, Unitree, etc. etc. and turn it into human-readable code. Broad utility across every industry with tons of willing buyers.
Hardware, though. We need that part.
by echelon - This is way more of what I thought robotics companies should be working on over their dumb 4 legged dog like robots. Wheels were invented for a reason and we are awfully good at moving things around on them at speed. Combining multiple attributes into a single form will ultimately prove to be the winning formula.
Just like in a year or two you will start to see more appendages than just two arms on humanoids.
by Aboutplants - > Wheels were invented for a reason
Literally we have a very old saying that is "don't reinvent the wheel" and yet people persist in doing so, when an already near optimal design exists.
I'm not saying don't do anything new and novel but that if a large portion of the design has already been done for you and you can improve it, like this company has done (wheels on the end of legs!), why not try that first and see if it works before starting over.
by walrus01 - I think this is a clever idea.
A hub motor for each leg adds some weight, but you get a rolling mode on flat terrain with great range.
At the same time you keep obstacle climbing mode with stationary wheels, and can use the leg actuators as shock absorbers and obstacle avoidance on a bumpy path. Best of both worlds, with a new software challenge.
by schobi