Already did, months ago, seems a little less impressive now, having seen the videos of its high speed cousin Wildcat.

also Boston Dynamics has recently been bought up by Google along with a dozen others, should be interesting to see what comes out of all that, since Google clearly had a plan in mind when they targeted those specific companies.

Thank you so much, Shadowydreamer, that means a lot! I know it’s frustrating to reach the end of the archives, but we’ll have a new page every week, so we hope you keep coming back!

I love this comic, a great weaving of plots, great art, and purpose. Fantastic 🙂

You might be interested in checking out the Army’s bigdog program.

To be clear, all of the “voiceover” is coming from Agnes. But because she tends to get her own thoughts confused with other peoples’, she’s speaking as if she were Henry, Luke and Max here. Technically, she probably knows who is who, but when she’s not concentrating on it, the pronouns can get mixed up.

Something that’s going to come up later in the story is that Max was so frustrated by his failure at creating an autonomous robot, and so afraid of letting people down, that he completely failed to realize that he’d invented a neural interface that was at least as useful as a robot would have been.

Agnes may not be able to fit inside the Golem though-it looks like Max is fairly comfortable in there, but she may not feel the same way. Plus, he built the thing. She may not be qualified to pilot it either, when it’s revealed it needs a pilot.

Kinda funny how IRL roboticist’s can readily make robot’s capable of
complex physical tasks, but as far as we know they have yet to crack the
holy grail of robotics, true Artificial Intelligence.

Where as
Max has the opposite problem, he’s created a nascent AI in the Golem,
but it either lacks the required experience; or just as likely, it lacks
the processing speed and system memory to cope with the mind bending
amount of calculations needed to balance and move a humanoid form with
any appreciable speed.

We rarely consider just how complicated
the mere act of walking can be, but even now IRL humanoid robot designs
are the most challenging to develop; to cite a fairly commonly known
example, the Asimo robots created by Honda, each cost a great deal of
money to build, and they are just the latest iteration of a long line of
experimental designs developed by Honda’s robotics research program
over the past two decades.

Makes me wish *I* still lived in Cleveland. (Mid-1960s to early-1970s.)

And then I remember the weather that you’ve been getting lately. (Not that ours has been much better. Indianapolis just broke it’s all-time snowfall record this past weekend.)