It’s been just over 12 years since Boston Dynamics unveiled its bipedal Atlas robot, and along the way it’s made huge advances in both mobility and AI capabilities.
A new video (top) shared by the Massachusetts-based team on Wednesday highlights the progress made on one of the most challenging areas of a humanoid robot — the hands.
Instead of trying to precisely emulate a human hand, Boston Dynamics is focusing on developing a dexterous gripper that’s both rugged and reliable, making it ideal for tasks such as sorting, picking and packing, as well as handling heavy objects.
“Grippers are one of the most intricate components of a humanoid robot,” Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas, says in the video. “We have to put in a lot of actuation and sensing into a very small space, so it’s a very hard design problem.”
Karl Price, mechanical engineer for Atlas, showed off the new, three-fingered gripper for the Atlas robot.
The second-generation device has seven degrees of freedom and seven different actuators — two for each of the fingers and one for the newly added articulated thumb joint. It also has tactile sensing on the fingertips and cameras in the palm.
Not surprisingly, the addition of the thumb has significantly boosted the humanoid robot’s abilities.
“That really expands the type of grasps that it allows us to do,” Rodriguez said. “Over the last year or so, we’ve realized that we can grasp almost anything that we throw at it.”
The Atlas team settled on the idea of adding three fingers because it believed it was the fewest number required to complete a range of complex manipulation tasks, while the thumb allows for precise and careful handling of more delicate objects.
The current goal, Rodriguez said, is to create a gripper “with the right sweet spot of dexterity, actuation, and sensing,” adding that his team is “very excited to see where it takes us.”
Boston Dynamics is one of a growing number of companies working on humanoid robots that could one day transform the workplace, especially in industrial settings. Some companies are also developing robots for domestic use, with California-based Figure expected to make a big announcement on the subject later this week.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.