More field work with LS3 in this video from the DARPA youtube channel (as opposed to the Boston Dynamics channel, where I generally prefer to get them).  This one demonstrates the LS3’s “follow tight” mode which allows it to follow a human operator.

Right off the bat, it seemed like the robot took longer than I would expect to power up; maybe they need to replace those spinning drives with SSDs :).  On the plus side, voice control is nice and I was very impressed by how quiet the machine is, especially compared with Big Dog; it didn’t sound too much louder than the noise made by the operator walking through leaves at a normal pace.

In the dry stream bed, it seemed like the stance should have been much wider for more stability, but I expect that there is a good reason for the design choices that were made.  The little tumble that the machine takes into the stream is amusing, but there was something that I didn’t notice on my first viewing: the robot rolls right onto a barely visible stationary camera that looked like it was placed slightly downstream to catch a different angle of the crossing; you can even briefly see a team member hop to safety on the right side of the frame.  This also explains the way that the scene was cut the way it was: they extricated the camera and moved the robot upstream a bit before filming the “standing up” behavior.  I originally thought that there must have been some problem on the first standup attempt that caused them to decide to reshoot, but now I bet that the machine could have stood up and kept going much more quickly.  The rest of the video after that is fairly unremarkable, although I found it amusing that the stop sign appeared to be in English and Arabic; check it out for yourself: