[1] Boston Dynamics is known for flashy videos showcasing its robots' impressive feats.
Atlas, a humanoid robot, has repeatedly gone viral for its unrivaled ability to jump over obstacles, do backflips, and dance. And the robotics company's latest video, which shows Atlas successfully running a parkour track, is no exception. Within hours of its release, it received hundreds of thousands of views and became one of the top 10 U.S. Twitter trends.
But a more interesting video didn't get as much attention:
an unprecedented behind-the-scenes account of how Boston Dynamics' engineers developed and trained Atlas to run the parkour track.
The video shows some of Atlas' failures and breaks with the company's tradition of sharing highly polished results of its work. The video and an accompanying
blog post provide some very important insights into the challenges of creating humanoid robots, including giving the robots "perception" and the pros and cons of simulation versus real-world training.
Another revelation sheds light on why the company teaches Atlas to do things that don't seem entirely useful. The basic premise is that if you can get a robot to do backflips, jump across platforms, vault over barriers, and run on very narrow paths, you will have taught it all the other basic movement and physical skills humans possess. "Parkour, as narrow and specific as it may seem, gives the Atlas team a perfect sandbox to experiment with new behaviors," reads the blog post. "It's a whole-body activity that requires Atlas to maintain its balance in different situations and seamlessly switch between one behavior and another."
>> Read more here. [2] Many robots are built on the
Robot Operating System (ROS), which is the de facto open source framework for robot application development. So the robotic future is coming. But developers must not lose sight of a critical priority:
security.
Robots are far more capable when connected to the internet, which allows them to work with other robots and access enterprise IT systems and
the cloud so they can process and learn from huge amounts of remotely stored data. Connectivity also provides agility for quick bug patching or system reconfiguration. But even if placed behind a firewall, inadequately secured robots may not be safe. If malware has a hold on a network and a robot is the unpatched, unsecured link in the chain, that robot will open the door to attackers. Imagine the damage that could be done if a hacker was able to maliciously hijack and control robots used in, say, a health care setting.
With competition in the robotics market heating up – worldwide spending is
forecast to reach $210 billion by 2025, more than double the 2020 total – companies will be increasingly tempted to ship quickly without rigorously hardening the machines against attack. But just as the industry has come to realize that the IoT is an attack surface that must be safeguarded as carefully as any other enterprise system, we must ensure security is a high priority in robotics deployment. The bottom line: We need to acknowledge that robots are vulnerable to cyberattacks or history will surely repeat itself.
>> Read more here. [3] The mass adoption of video conferencing technology has been one of the most visible and deeply felt workplace shifts of the pandemic. As many enterprises consider what a
return to the office might look like and what meeting technologies will best serve their new needs, more factors than ever are in play. An all-remote team is going to require a different approach than a hybrid team, for example.
"If people are coming in one day a week or four days a week, that's going to change [whether] you do dedicated desks or not," Nathan Coutinho, director of global conferencing strategy at Logitech, told VentureBeat. "And as people are going back, IT and HR departments are also really concerned about making sure the home work environment seamlessly integrates with the office. The other big consideration is how your teams actually work."
And even if you're not at all interested in options like
Facebook's VR-powered Horizon Workrooms, there's still a variety of emerging video conferencing technologies to choose from. One increasingly popular option, according to Coutinho, is proximity mobile app technology that lets users walk into a physical meeting room and seamlessly connect to the call on their smartphones using ultrasonic frequencies, similar to Apple's Airdrop feature. There's also Scribe, a Logitech webcam built specifically for whiteboards. It uses Bluetooth to project any typical whiteboard over video conferencing platforms, using AI to enhance the text and colors. Of course, there are also various controller systems and mic setups to consider. Throughout our interview, Coutinho broke down these shifts in meeting conferencing technology and how enterprises can navigate their changing needs.
>> Read the full conversation here. 
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