Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot can now jump up stairs like parkour pro

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas
robot.
Boston
Dynamics/YouTube

• Robotics company Boston Dynamics released a video of
  one of its robots doing parkour.
• The Atlas robot, which is humanoid in appearance, jumps
  over a log and then hops up a series of platforms.
• Boston Dynamics is famous for creating robots whose
  movements closely resemble humans and animals.

Boston Dynamics, the robotics company formerly owned by Google,
keeps giving its humanoid robots new abilities.

They can
open doors,
go for a jog outside, and even resist being pulled
around by human engineers. Now those same engineers have
given one of their robots the ability to do parkour.

Atlas is Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot, who you may have
already seen
performing a backflip.

In a video published by Boston Dynamics on Thursday, Atlas runs
and jumps over a log (no big deal,
we’ve seen it do this before) and then proceeds to nimbly hop
up a series of platforms.

Watch Atlas do parkour here:

In the past Boston Dynamics has caused a stir by creating robots
which imitate human or animal movement, such as its dog-like
robots which inspired
an episode of “Black Mirror.”

Boston Dynamics’ Spot
robot.

YouTube/jurvetson