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DARPA's Upgraded Atlas Robot Has Onboard Power and Wireless Communication

DARPA recently revealed upgrades to its Atlas robot, which was redesigned by Boston Dynamics. The upgraded Atlas is 75 percent new – only the lower legs and feet were carried over from the original design. Lighter materials allowed for inclusion of a battery and a new pump system with only a small increase in overall weight; the upgraded robot is 6-foot-2 and weighs 345 pounds. The most significant changes are to the robot's power supply and pump. Atlas will now carry an onboard 3.7-kWh lithium-ion battery pack, with the potential for one hour of 'mixed mission' operation that includes walking, standing, use of tools, and other movements. This will drive a new variable-pressure pump that allows for more efficient operation. Three onboard perception computers are used for perception and task planning, and a wireless router in the head enables untethered communication. The upgraded robot will be used by up to seven teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, which will take place June 5-6, 2015, at Fairplex in Pomona, CA. Given their identical hardware, the Atlas teams will have to differentiate themselves through software, control interfaces, and competition strategy.

Topics:
Automation Batteries Electronics & Computers Energy Energy Efficiency Energy Storage Motion Control Motors & Drives Power Power Management Power Transmission Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:02 [Music] there are many different kinds of robots in the DARPA robotics challenge seven of them are of the atlas type Atlas unplugged is the upgrade to Atlas to allow it to run entirely on batteries and to have it use a wireless communication path and for it to not require a safety tether to hold itself up basically we have to cut the cord we

    00:00:25 have to no longer rely on a safety line on the top you can see that there's one there right now and you're going to continue to use them during your testing but of course uh when we have the contest itself and you're getting ready for the contest that safety line is not going to be there anymore the new Atlas is 75% new only 25% of the parts that are in there are from the old Atlas the

    00:00:47 rest of them are really used for the onboard energy storage better Energy Efficiency much more dexterity and the robot is much quieter than it was before it also is a Little Bit Stronger so that it can better get off the ground in case it falls we Tri to make a number of Innovations to the new robot uh the primary one is the uh the new battery pack so in the back of the robot here

    00:01:07 you'll see a large box which represents all the energy that the teams will have to work with during the entire uh DRC finals that battery then goes through this brand new distribution panel uh that uh provides all the power on the robot in the heart of the robot is a brand new pump this is a very quiet pump and we're we're really excited about this pump because it makes the robot A

    00:01:29 lot quieter the teams can actually uh operate this robot without the uh the need for any hearing protection it's a variable uh pressure pump so that will allow the teams to change and decide what pressure they will use on the robot during any of the tasks of the competition and that will allow them to actually save battery power by using less pressure on the robot up here we

    00:01:51 will have a set of computers and the teams will use those to process images out of the sensor head and then command the robot to do its tasks the arms have been repositioned on this robot basically the shoulders have been flipped over you see they are now the arms come out from much lower in the robot and this allows the the users to have more workspace in

    00:02:11 front of the robot so it can see what its hands are doing these are the older forearms but we will have a new set of electric forearms which have a wrist degree of Freedom which will allow them to turn door knobs without having to torque the whole arm 3/4 of this robot has changed basically from the knees all the way up so the teams are going to have quite a job over the the next 3

    00:02:30 months to get reacquainted with the new Atlas unpluged the finals are going to be very hard they're going to be much harder than the trials were I know none of you like that idea uh but it's what we have to do in order to really bring these systems to the right level of development we want these tests to be much more authentic much more like real disasters we're going to make the

    00:02:50 communication much more realistic much more austere and difficult with long blackouts of up to a minute the robots are going to have to do all of these tasks in sequence without any human help there won't be be any possibility for a person to intervene and so the robots will have to perform much much better than before they'll have less time to do it only an hour for the entire Mission

    00:03:09 and um May the best robot win