The bipedal humanoid robot known as “Atlas” at the University of Hong Kong on Oct. 17, 2013. It is six feet tall and weighs 330 pounds.
WORCESTER, Mass. Atlas doesn’t shrug. But he teeters, loses his grip, stutters and staggers.
His task one afternoon is to clear a debris field. After many agonizing moments, in a set of abrupt and jerky movements, he crouches and with painstaking precision manages to grasp a two-by-four board and then drop it to his right. At the rate he is moving, completing the chore might take days.
Atlas in this case is an imposing, six-foot-tall humanoid robot that evokes the bipedal “Star Wars” robot C-3PO. It stands in a cluttered robotics laboratory here at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where a team of students, engineers and software hackers are training the 330-pound bundle of sensors, computers, metal struts, joints and cables.
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