Robots Take Next Step In Slow World Take Over: Stairs

By Will LeBlanc | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

If you aren’t prepared to be ruled by a race of government-produced super-robots, I have some news for you. It’s going to happen, and likely sooner rather than later. Sure, we’ve passed all the points in the Terminator timelines when Skynet was scheduled to go live, but that doesn’t mean humans aren’t still slowly setting themselves up for a hostile uprising a la Battlestar Galactica.

Case in point, DARPA has released footage of their latest bipedal robot climbing stairs, a task it needs to accomplish in order to reach most human bedrooms so they can murder their oppressors in their sleep. Witness your future overlords below.


It may not look like much, but seeing a robot do push ups is strangely unsettling. It’s like they’re making them more like Arnold Schwarzenegger just so it will remind us of Terminator

Jokes aside, this is maybe not the hugest step in robotics, but the balance and positional awareness is important in furthering research. There’s even a moment in the video where you see the operator reach over and push the robot, which has no problem steadying itself before continuing to walk as if nothing had happened. We have only really seen this kind of balance in quadrupedal bots so far. Cool stuff.

It will be an interesting decade to come in the field of advanced robotics with breakthroughs like this coming pretty regularly. Soon enough we’ll have a bot similar enough to a human that we can stick it on a rocket, put it on a distant planet, and have an operator here on Earth controlling in remotely in a virtual reality situation. And then it can malfunction, become self aware, and begin building its own robot army to attack us with from outer space. Guys, it’s going to happen.