A Parody of Boston Dynamics Robots Fighting Back

Anyone with the slightest interest in robots will have watched a Boston Dynamics video at some point. Each time Atlas, Spot, or one of the robots is further developed they release a video to show the new skills. Let’s be honest, they do have quite an impressive range and will often do things like knock a robot over to show how they can recover and get back up. What you don’t usually see is robots fighting back. Recently, a video was released of a robot fighting back when they were abused in this way and unless you looked closely, you may not have realized that the name on the video was Bosstown Dynamics rather than Boston Dynamics.

The send-up video was put together by Corridor Digital who is an LA production studio that specializes in special effects. It involves a robot that looks very similar to Atlas getting a beating from the testers all in the name of research. The difference is that the robot fights back and there were a lot of people that thought it was for real.
Plenty of viewers were fooled into thinking that the robot was really kicking the testers where it hurts most and Corridor Digital has such a backlash they had to issue a clarification that no robots or humans were harmed at all in the making of the video.

Proving It Was Not Robots Fighting Back

They then put out a follow-up video from behind the scenes showing how the faked the robot’s revenge had been made. What corridor had done is dress a team member in an Xsens motion capture suit and rigged a CG robot model to the suit. The bot you can see on the screen moves exactly how the actor’s body moves as it is being driven by equipment designed for this purpose.

The two videos are here for you to view and make your own mind up, but they have caused a lot of debate about what could happen in the future if robots did decide to retaliate. The biggest worry seems to be that a bot could wreak havoc in retaliation without thinking twice about it. Or of course, a bot could malfunction and do serious injury to humans very quickly.

The debate about this, and who would be responsible if it happens is a major concern and not just for the developers. Governments also have these concerns and legal arguments are taking place worldwide as to whether the developer, the owner or whoever is in charge of the robot is responsible for their actions. The US, China, The European Union and many others are involved in these discussions and it will probably be some years before they can all agree. In the meantime, let’s just hope that there are no robots fighting back.