I know dexterous robots are still nowhere good enough nor cheap enough to be commonplace in work and home, but I’m awed by how far they’ve advanced in the years I’ve been doing this blog. In that short span, they’ve gone from tethered oafs to off-the-chain champions.

Boston Dynamics, now an Alphabet company, just released footage of the latest iteration of its free-range Atlas robot. You can check it with a hockey stick or send it out into the snow, but it will not be stopped. From Wired:

Marvel at how much this bipedal platform has advanced. In its last iteration, Atlas was tethered to an external power source. This version is battery powered, sleeker, quieter, and much more agile. “It’s definitely kind of jaw dropping,” says Ken Goldberg, robotics professor at UC Berkeley. “They’ve really smoothed out a lot of the motion.” The extra smoothness in the robot’s motions made him feel pretty weird, especially when Atlas got prodded by the dude with the hockey stick. “It definitely triggered the uncanny valley response,” he says. “I mean, most of us probably had the same reaction when it got pushed around: We expected it to turn around and blast that guy with a laser beam.”•