I don’t often post YouTube videos, but this one elicited a “wow” …

I’ve only dabbled in AI-type programming, but I can appreciate the amount of computation that’s going on in real time here. The Big Dog recovers nicely from a hard shove at about 0:40, but that’s nothing compared to scrabbling on the ice at about 1:25. I found myself thinking through the subroutines, if-then statements, and 3D math required to figure out where to move your feet to counterbalance the weight that your carrying.

A little research on Google and Wikipedia and covered some interesting facts about Boston Dynamics; they are a spinoff from MIT doing a number of different robotics projects.

This is the posted in many places. I saw it on Make and BoingBoing, but it’s cross-posted everywhere.