Just last week, a pair of Boston Dynamics Atlas robots Atlas successfully completed a complex obstacle course at the company’s headquarters, but they didn’t do it flawlessly. The first of the two made its way up a series of banked plywood panels, broad jumped a gap, and ran up and down stairs in the course set up on the second floor.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is sending a robot into space, and it may be one you’re already familiar with. This four-legged explorer prototype, called NeBula-SPOT, combines autonomous technologies provided by JPL with a doglike likes. Boston Dynamics developed this subterranean Spot robot in response to a contest sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).