See Boston Dynamics robot dog Spot skipping
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “New Ji-won” (ID: AI_era), Author: New Ji-won, editor: Q.
Boston Dynamics just released a new video of Spot, the robot dog. In the video, it cleans the room, switches the valve, and even skips the rope.
On the New Year’s Eve, Boston Dynamics just released a video clip of Spot ballet dancing, with small toes and graceful swan necks. Look at Spot Mini again. It has an internal taste… .
Atlas, the humanoid robot even showed some new tricks, standing on one foot effortlessly, twisting the body, and ghost dance, and it has a great posture to dominate the dance floor.
One month later, Boston Dynamics released another video, showing Spot’s new skills after installing the robotic arm. This robotic arm is mounted on the back of the robot dog and can perform a series of fine movements, such as digging holes and drawing with chalk.
Boston Dynamics said: “Now, in addition to the legs and the camera, Spot also has an arm, which can be moved.” It can find and pick up items (garbage), clean the living room, open the gate, operate switches and valves, and take care of the garden. It is fun in general.
This time Spot even learned to “skipping rope”:
Do you think two people are shaking the rope, let’s look at the camera further away:
Three Spots are playing skipping rope together! The robot dogs at both ends control the rope perfectly, and the robot dog in the middle can jump over at the right time.
In addition, Spot has also learned operations such as opening switches and closing valves, which can reduce the manual risk in certain dangerous scenarios in the future:
In his back garden, Spot also learned to dig holes and plant flowers:
The movement of the Spot robot dog’s hands, arms and body is automatically coordinated, which simplifies the operation task and expands the working space of the arm, making it basically unbounded. The actions shown here are mobile operations programmed using a new API, supporting user applications, and tablets, allowing users to perform remote operationsMade.
In addition, the basic Spot robot has optional additional components, including a flat panel controller and a lidar system, which can complete more functions and tasks.
At the same time, a Spot Arm video also previewed an expanded Spot product line that Boston Dynamics will launch in February. The company promised to “expand the value of Spot in autonomous testing and data collection.”
This means that Boston Dynamics may accelerate the speed of commercialization.
However, some people have some doubts about the Spot robot dog:
How to match the product with the actual market demand is a problem. The biggest advantage of legged robots is that they can overcome obstacles. But in actual use, the wheeled robot can complete 90% of the work. But who is willing to pay multiple times for the remaining 10% of the use cases?
This is really a god dog, but…it can’t help but worry that it will have an evil side. How to use it may lead to different endings.
Some people even used a picture to express their concerns about robotic arm robots:
This is reminiscent of “Heavy Metal” in “Black Mirror”…
In the episode, the world has been controlled by mechanical dogs. In order to avoid being chased by mechanical dogs, human beings live a life of fleeing famine and establishing shelters.
Think carefully. The robot dog here is not only equipped with a variety of weapons, trackers (which can detect human movements at any time), solar charging, but also able to control mechanical equipment and share communication systems.
Last year, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Hyundai Korea from SoftBank for US$1.1 billion. This is the third time it has changed ownership in seven years.
This company was initially incubated in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1992, the company became independent. After that, Boston Dynamics quickly became a well-known robot manufacturing company.
At the laboratory stage of MIT, it was famous for its dog-like quadruped robots (the most famous is the BigDog funded by DARPA, the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the company’s first commercial robot Spot. Predecessor.)
In 2013, it was acquired by Google’s parent company Alphabet’s X division, and in 2017 it was acquired by SoftBank. After being acquired by SoftBank, Boston Dynamics has been actively promoting the “commercialization” of its products. Prior to this, the company has focused on military and robotics research for 25 years.
Most of the time, Boston Dynamics is more like a “research institute” than a company, mass production of technologically advanced but “unprofitable” machines.
This has a lot to do with its founder, Marc Raibert.
Mark Ray Potter is a typical “academic entrepreneur”. After obtaining his PhD from MIT, he founded the CMU leg laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and served as an associate professor.