| I think some commenter’s may be misunderstanding the motivation for doing this. …this is “the first time that the legs of a legged robot are concurrently utilized for locomotion and for a different task.” This is distinct from other robots that can (for example) open doors with their feet, because those robots stop using the feet as feet for a while and instead use them as manipulators. So, this is about a lot more than cigarette butts, and the researchers suggest a variety of other potential use cases, including spraying weeds in crop fields, inspecting cracks in infrastructure, and placing nails and rivets during construction. Some use cases include potentially doing multiple things at the same time, like planting different kinds of seeds, using different surface sensors, or driving both nails and rivets. And since quadrupeds have four feet, they could potentially host four completely different tools, and the software that the researchers developed for VERO can be slightly modified to put whatever foot you want on whatever spot you need. So, to me, this sounds like a somewhat abstract research problem that some one found a fun concrete way to start progress on. The point isn’t that this is a usable product but rather something which moves the research forward. Take a look at the history of boston dynamics and you will see similarly impractical real world robots. For example, this is a video of one of their earlier much simpler robots: https://youtu.be/Bd5iEke6UlE This Lex Friedman podcast interviews the founder of boston dynamics Marc Reibert and he goes into great detail how they started simple and built from there: https://lexfridman.com/marc-raibert/ |