Comment by regularfry

Some of it was pre-computed. The middle layer, if you like. The Boston Dynamics group had walking gait of a sort nailed in the 80's; the trotting-on-the-spot that BigDog did was essentially a continuation of those mechanics and that's all based on a conceptually simple balance problem which is intrinsically reactive and not pre-planned. So that's what was going on at the lowest level.

At the top level you have the actual environment, with those meme videos of the robot trotting through a car park, getting kicked off balance, and recovering. The whole point of those tests was to demonstrate how robust their tech was to non-precomputed disturbances.

And between the two you've got the direction and planning layer, telling the robot to go from A to B with some set of suitably convoluted parameters that nobody but the operators would have understood. That planning layer might do all sorts of pre-computation and simulation but it needs to do it in the context of a noisy and possibly adversarial environment. That's equally true for Atlas as much as it was for BigDog, even when there's nobody actually kicking it. What I suspect the precompute and simulation is doing at that layer is a) checking for physical viability of the requested route, and b) parameter tuning in response to sensor readings over a number of runs. Not telling the robot the exact sequence of motions. But I'm nowhere near those teams (oh, I wish) to comment on whether that's true - maybe someone else round here is.