Video Of Those Parkour Robots Slipping And Busting Themselves Up Is Funnier Than It Should Be

For those of us who have seen the Terminator movies one too many times and are forever afraid of the inevitable robot takeover, fear not.

You will shortly see robots are nowhere near that level yet.

Meet Atlas, the robot, who is fostered by Boston Dynamics.

Atlas is a very capable humanlike robot shown here doing parkour, a kind of cross between an obstacle course and gymnastics.

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Atlas can run, jump and flip of its own accord....sometimes.

As Parkour is designed mostly for extremely fit humans, the robot no doubt had a little trouble, but the images of it just going down on its face are priceless.

But controls engineer Sean Mason said on Boston Dynamics' blog:

"For this team, watching the robot fail is one of the best parts. Every failure is seen as a chance to make the robot better and more robust."

However, Atlas is still a remarkable feat of engineering.

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"There are a lot of pretty exciting behaviors here, and some of them are not totally reliable yet," said Ben Stephens, the Atlas controls lead, on the Boston Dynamics blog.

"Every behavior here has a small chance of failure. It's almost 90 seconds of continuous jumping, jogging, turning, vaulting, and flipping, so those probabilities add up."

Atlas is a learning technology, so for every cute mistake we see it make, it learns more and more about that particular skill.

One day Atlas will likely have mastered plenty more basic skills.