MIT's DARPA Atlas Robot Slated To Shed Wire Tethers

This past August, MIT unboxed the impressive Atlas Robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, revealing a rather massive piece of machinery complete with various tethers that provide it with fluid and other necessities. In the next six or so months, MIT aims to get rid of those cables, among other things.

Work on the Atlas robot has continued steadily since its public unboxing, and as you can see in the image above, it still bears the various cables that help give it life. In the next six months, the MIT team tasked with developing the robot want to change this, making it tether-free.

In addition, the MIT team is also said to be working on altering the robot's code so that the humanoid robot will be both more autonomous and faster — in essence, to allow Atlas to run on its own briefly if there's a blackout, and to make certain decisions rather than waiting for commands.

This latest batch of work, which was detailed recently by the MIT team, is in preparation for the next DARPA Robotics Challenge that takes place at the end of the year. The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is doing the work.

SOURCE: TIME