It will be a while until robots take over the planet

Nov 19, 2014 10:35 GMT  ·  By

DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is involved in a number of interesting projects, including robotic technology, and it looks like Ubuntu is playing an important role.

DARPA is sponsoring the development of humanoid robots, and Atlas is just one of them. It's designed and built by Boston Dynamics in collaboration with DARPA, and its makers have made great progress.

In the end, the US military is funding the development of these robots, so it's likely that they will eventually have some military applications as well. For now, Atlas is just trying to go over some obstacles and not fall down, which appears to be much harder than you can imagine.

As it was to be expected, the designers and builders of this project are using their own tools, but they also rely on Ubuntu to do their work.

This is not actually all that surprising, because lots of scientists and engineers from around the world are using Linux distributions, be they NASA, Fermi Labs, CERN, or the Europeans Space Agency.

Using Ubuntu to build robots doesn't seem all that strange

Finding Ubuntu running in unexpected places is actually a favorite pastime of the community and the operating system has been found in many instances, like in a NASA mission on a plane over the Antarctic or in the JPL laboratories.

Ubuntu is not the only operating system used by the scientific community. SUSE also plays a big role, along with Red Hat Enterprise or Scientific Linux.

"The US military Atlas robot project will be helpful in further developing robotic technology for the us military. Atlas is a bipedal humanoid robot primarily developed by the American robotics company Boston Dynamics, with funding and oversight from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The 6-foot (1.8 m) robot is designed for a variety of search and rescue tasks."

"A humanoid robot is a robot with its body shape built to resemble that of the human body. A humanoid design might be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other purposes," reads the introduction on the YouTube page.

The Ubuntu sighting can be identified at the 1.50-minute mark, although the entire video is quite interesting to watch. The robots are not scary, at least not yet, and the fact that they are using Ubuntu is definitely a plus.

Ubuntu used by DARPA (10 Images)

Ubuntu used by DARPA
Robot's handThe Atlas robot
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