Atlas, an advanced humanoid robot, stepped pitch side to deliver the match ball to the referee at halftime at New York New Jersey Stadium, where Brazil were playing Norway in the round of 16 on Sunday.
Its moves imitated a few uncanny goal celebrations, including Norwegian striker Erling Haaland's meditation pose. Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, said replicating human skills has always been a key motivation for the research team to continue improving the robot's capabilities.
“In this case, it was hard to pass the opportunity to use soccer as a motivation to do that getting Atlas to do iconic celebrations of famous players or iconic soccer kicks. It was a way to, one hand, just solve a really hard problem because it forced us to move in a more agile, faster way than we’ve done it in the past, some of the quick feet work. It’s challenging doing it on grass, which can be slippery, or very compliant or your feet can get stuck. Doing it reliably that was challenging and interacting with the ball in a way that can be precise, that was also challenging,” said Rodriguez.
Standard Wi-Fi communications with Atlas were out of the question, with tens of thousands of fans surrounding the pitch with cellphones, so a new communications channel was established with a radio device attached to the robot's back. Rodriguez added the grass has its own peculiarity, thus their group had to change the way that Atlas learns to walk and learns to jump and run so that its movements are more robust.
