Is the most significant military robot slinking around a lab in Massachusetts?

https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/robotics/2017/11/20/is-the-most-significant-military-robot-slinking-around-a-lab-in-waltham-mass/

If you exist on the internet, odds are you’re familiar with the work of Boston Dynamics. The robot makers, once owned by Google, make wobbly legged machines, unsettling in their movements and uncanny in their ability to stay balanced, even when crossing ice or climbing hills.

BigDog is the best-known of these robots, an oversized quadruped. But there are others. Atlas captures the attention of much of robot-watching twitter last week, as the humanoid robot gracefully completed a backflip.

Lost in the cheers and panic over a coming SkyNet was new footage of another robot, one that the defense community might want to take a little more seriously. It’s the updated version of the dog-sized SpotMini, and it looks like nothing so much as a mutant-hunting dog from a lost X-Men franchise. Here’s a peek at the latest SpotMini:

Watch it again. Take a close look at the articulation in those legs, the way it bends and balances and then bounds away. Legged robots are compelling because they can go where people can, and smaller, animal-inspired robots can go the places that people can’t. It’s easy to imagine a camouflaged version of the SpotMini peeking under beds and around corners ahead of a unit going house-to-house, maybe with infrared vision alerting it to hiding people it may not otherwise find.

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