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Parkour Atlas

14 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this demo1 month2018–2021 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN cites it as a striking demonstration of how far humanoid robot agility had come.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the Atlas humanoid robot doing parkour, jumping over a log and leaping up steps using whole-body control and computer vision to locate markers.

“Their latest video of Atlas doing parkour is just insane” (HN, 2018)

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Demos · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@elteto Oct 2018 Recommends
on HN thread Boston Dynamics: UpTown Spot
I still can't understand why Google sold Boston Dynamics, it baffles me. These guys have been pushing the boundaries of robotic motion for years. I see it as another example of Google's inability to focus on anything that is not core services. Their latest video of Atlas doing parkour is just insane [0]. You'd think that with Google's focus on AI they'd want to own and keep under a tight lid tech as impressive as BD's. [0] [this video]
Atlas robot performing parkour

Citations, criticism and jokes

@icebraining Oct 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Paralysed man moves in mind-reading exoskeleton
While full control is obviously better for some things, I wonder if overall this isn't better. It would reduce the training from having to adapt your brain to control a foreign body, to just issuing simpler commands, and might be safer too. Imagine using Atlas[1] as the exoskeleton, you just think about going forward and it navigates the terrain for you. [1] [this video]
@PeterisP Jun 2020 Cites it
on HN thread How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)
Read more
Bipedal walking and running on uneven terrain has been demonstrated years ago - Boston Dynamics has a lot of nice videos; e.g. here's a four year old video on walking [link] , here's two year old videos on running [link] and [this video] - perhaps it's debatable if it's "full human level" but it seems sufficient to me for most purposes. IMHO any improvements to that would be mostly for sensors (seeing what terrain is there even in poor conditions e.g. fog/rain/snow) and modelling environment (understanding which objects might break or slide if you step on them), not walking/running as such. The main problem for bipedal robots that makes them still impractical is the hardware expense (wheels are simpler and cheaper) and the power supply required, so for most use cases it's more efficient to use something other than a bipedal robot and there's limited business application and future revenue in scaling up research demos of bipedal walking to practicality, so most people who are working on walking algorithms are doing so in simulated virtual environments (where we have algorithms that can learn walking and running "from scratch" through experimentation) and not building very expensive hardware.
@shadowgovt Aug 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Atlas robot does parkour
It's interesting to see how this has progressed from their video two years ago [ [this video] ] and one year ago [ [link] ]
Atlas progress over two years

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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