^{Image Source: Wired}

• News often sensationalizes new technologies and they really haven't progressed as far as we may give them credit for.

• There's no need to fear robots like Atlas and SpotMini. They are a long way away from being able to take over the world according to experts.

The field of robotics is constantly expanding and improving upon techniques learned from previous design concepts. We have seen a lot of hoopla coming out of this field in the past few years with names like Boston Dynamics, Honda and Toyota often making the news for the latest and greatest in robotic technologies.

Personally I was amazed at some of the robots that made the news in 2017. I was most impressed with Toyota's T-HR3 and Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot. The thing about Boston Dynamics that really impresses me is the speed at which they are coming out with new models and the features each new robot is equipped with!

Of course when Boston Dynamics hits the news with a new robot it causes a viral buzz on social media every time it posts a new video of one of its robots moving around the lab.

Then people start screaming that its the first sign of the inevitable robo-pocalypse! Fortunately, with a little advice from experts, you can see much of that panic is just based on the hype and not the facts. The bottom line is that Boston Dynamics is doing outstanding work in the field of robotics and in this article I'm going to try to seperate some of the hype from the facts.

So lets get started here shall we? Firstly, if you want to behave like a robotics expert when you watch one of these new release robot videos, you'll need to become more critical. If you look a bit deeper, you'll notice that Boston Dynamics is a private company and not an academic entity. You'd be surprised how rare it is to actually see the company publish its findings.

This makes it hard to know what's really going on inside the robots. "We have an idea about what approaches they are using" says Ioannis Havoutis, a researcher in robotics focusing on leg locomotion at the Oxford Robotics Institute, "but apart from a few papers, we can only guess what they are doing."

Take a look at this video below to see some amazing robots in action!

Ok, so far we have learned that things aren't always what they seem and that robot hype and robot fact may not go hand in hand. One reason we shouldn't panic about what we are seeing is because for robots to actually gain proficiency in most fields they will have to be able to overcome complex challenges with little margin for error. So if we start by understanding the calculations and margins involved in the robots' activities its easy to see that Boston Dynamics' robots have a larger margin of error than most robots are given.

"Boston Dynamics do not worry about sub-millimetre accuracy, they worry about the functional accuracy," says Thrishantha Nanayakkara, reader in design engineering and robotics at Imperial College London. "[Atlas] is metastable, so it's stable most of the time. There is a probability that it can go wrong, and they take that chance. Most robots we know in the industry don't take that chance." Being metastable means Atlas has to balance itself to stay upright, just like a human.

But even Atlas' backflip only requires "a very crude calculation to make the jump." "Then when it lands, it makes the corrections. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough."

So we can see that BD is kind of cheating right? Boston Dynamics' has many experiments involving movement. This can include irregular or tricky terrain like grass or snow. As a result robots can be designed with an even greater margin.

"There is no need for precision there," says Nanayakkara. "The important thing is to finish the calculation within the deadline."

In the case of BigDog, one of the firm's earlier machines, the calculation is working out how to stay upright, and the deadline is the moment when it can no longer right itself and then falls over.

Well, BigDog is certainly impressive! In robotics terms having enough time can be a lot different than human terms. Keep in mind calculations can be made in milliseconds!