The Tokyo Summer Olympics 2020 just got over last week! The game was a mash-up of skills, emotions, and memories: the Robot Mascots, the BasketBall Robot, medal tally, the broken world records, and much more.

Sydney McLaughlin broke one such record by winning the gold medal by finishing the 400-meter hurdles race in 51.46 seconds. Everything takes effort and training!

The Olympics is over, but we have a team of engineers who are making all the effort to train a robot like an Olympian.

Boston Dynamics, famous for its Spot Robot that explores caves for the Mars Mission, has developed a bipedal humanoid robot called Atlas. Though it doesn’t look like a gymnast, it leaps, bounds and backflips, just like human athletes.

Recently, two new videos have been posted by the robot firm owned by Hyundai. The first illustrates how successfully the Atlas robot can perform Parkour, while the second video takes us in the background to explain how Atlas gets trained. This is the first time Atlas has perfectly completed the challenging obstacle course, and Boston wants to highlight it.

In one video, it is seen that two Atlas robots can now execute Parkour. The video shows two bipedal humanoid robots performing synchronized movements like turning, spinning, and flipping, mirroring each other’s moves.

In another video, the team talks about the working and specifications of the robots. Atlas Robot is five feet tall and weighs around 89 kg. It is a lightweight robot that relies on 3D printed elements for performing leaps and somersaults. Atlas’ innovative control system enables highly diversified and agile mobility, while algorithms plan movements by reasoning through complicated dynamic interactions involving the entire body and environment. Atlas has RGB cameras and depth sensors that provide information to its control system with three built-in computers.

Atlas has the most compact hydraulic systems in the world. A custom battery, valves, and a lightweight hydraulic power unit allow Atlas to supply any of its 28 hydraulic joints with high power output for excellent mobility features.

We all anticipate Boston robots to accomplish great things after the SPOT dancing video last time with its choreography software, and the video on Parkour does not disappoint. But all the hard work, errors, and challenges that need to be fixed to make these demonstrations possible are not usually shown to the viewers. But, this time, after its exceptional training to the Atlas robot, Boston Dynamics wanted to disclose all the behind the scenes which you can see in the second video.

It’s more than most humans can, but the Boston Dynamics team explains that robots don’t navigate an unexpected route intelligently. They were trained to accomplish it and programmed accordingly. Hence, it is justifiable to say that Atlas is trained like an Olympian.

After the release of the videos, it is evident that we can rely on Atlas for emergency services or rescue operations. Atlas is designed to assist in an emergency by completing activities such as closing valves, opening doors, and running powered equipment in settings where humans would fail. Boston Dynamics is coming up with exceptional robots that perform better than humans, which is extremely impressive.