Google's New Robot Can Chase You Through The Woods

Boston Dynamics. Remember the name.

Because it's probably one of their robots that's going to be responsible for the first Skynet-style battlefield deployment. 

Purchased by Google (now Alphabet?) back in 2013, they've got a robot that runs at 28mph, a 'dog' (BigDog, to be exact) that can carry 155kg loads and they're current developing droids for the US military.

Their humanoid robot, Atlas, was shown off some years ago walking over simulated rocky terrain and taking knocks from large weights to test its balancing abilities. Now, the team of Boston Dynamics have taken it for a run outside - a far harsher testing environment than any lab-based scenario. The results are terrifying.

Sure, the Atlas does stumble around this forest test location with all the grace of a city boy eight pints into a Friday night - and it's not entirely mobile, given that its power supply has to be hardwired into its back.

But it's a glimpse of the future that Boston Dynamics is working towards; a future in which military units will no longer have to carry their own heavy equipment, but can rely on a range of robots to do the heavy lifting for them.

We don't even want to think about what they're capable of if you give them a gun.

[Via: Popular Science]