Hardware Podcasts

3 Laws robot safety and the evolution of bipedal locomotion

The Robot Report Podcast · 16 Feb 2024 · 1h 13m

What this episode covers

Dr. Aaron Ames, Professor at Caltech and co-founder of 3Laws Robotics, discusses the evolution of bipedal locomotion and the company's safety-critical controls architecture. He explains how his lab's research into dynamic walking and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) led to the creation of 3Laws, a middleware solution that acts as a safety filter for any robotic system. Ames argues that while recent humanoid surges are driven by cheaper quadruped hardware and proof-of-concept demos, true commercial viability requires robust, dynamic walking algorithms rather than static, fragile models. The episode details the technical implementation of CBFs as lightweight, explainable safety layers that guarantee robots do not harm humans, regardless of the underlying autonomy or learning stack.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
3Laws Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Agility Robotics, Figure, Hello Robots, Anywhere Robotics, In Orbit, Mass Robotics, SRI
Also
Caltech, A3, DARPA, NASA, MIT, Texas A&M, UCLA, University of Michigan

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