It's all electric, and check out the fancy white armor at <a href="https://youtu.be/tf7IEVTDjng?t=117" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tf7IEVTDjng?t=117</a><p>Looks like they've taken the criticism from Google et al. to heart. It was hard to see how the huge, gas-powered robots louder than lawnmowers were going to work for anyone except maybe military applications. Put some state of the art Google AI into this thing and it's not far from a sellable product!
These press releases from BD are certainly impressive and are always great fun to watch.<p>But they're mostly silent on the matter of how much autonomy the robots are operating with. I never know how much of their behavior is human directed, or how those directions are conveyed to the robots.
If it really is using all electric actuators that's pretty big. This would be one of the first of Boston Dynamics' all electric robots.<p>What exactly does using electric actuators over hydraulics buy us? Less noise, greater efficiency, and reliability. Reliability is very important for both house hold and industrial robots. We typically measure reliability in terms of Mean Time Between Failures, aka, how long it typically last before breaking. For industrial robots this is important as the higher the reliability is the more money it makes. Industrial robots tend to have MTBFs of 100,000 hours or about 10 years.<p>Reliability is also important for household robots too, a big expensive robot that breaks down all the time appeals to few people.
Google just said, "Wait! Did we say we are focusing on a 'household robot' and are therefore going to sell Boston Dynamics? Hehe. Just kidding about selling BD!" The cleaning up, stair climbing and fall recovery are seriously impressive.
Feels like living in the future.<p>We could have right now a RoboDog, with some machine guns on it and let them patrol and secure a perimeter. Fire at anything it moves. I hope they solve the issue with the banana peel :), though.
Now that's a nice piece of machinery. Much closer to a salable product than the big machines they did for DoD. This is more in line with Google's business model. Maybe this is BD's effort to stay under the Alphabet umbrella. It will be good if it works.<p>They really have leg control and balance software figured out now. That machine is more agile than any of the previous BD machines.
Its really amazing to see how functional this robot is. I cant wait for one to take over for some of the more monotonous tasks around the house...<p>That said, the way it moves around and can keeps its head steady is both really cool, but somewhat terrifying... It seems to conjure up scenes from movies where the antagonist robots are scanning a target before deciding to kill or not.
Url changed from <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/23/12014008/boston-dynamics-spotmini-alphabet-giraffe-spot-robot" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/23/12014008/boston-dynamics-s...</a>, which points to this.