hey guys you're about to watch another spot video but before he did I needed to
make a couple of announcements to make some things clear the reason you see us
all hanging out with each other unabashedly is specifically because we'd
shot this before the shelter-in-place order went down actually I think a
couple of weeks before which is why we're so cavalier about personal space
but second and most importantly I wanted to talk about safety issues regarding
the handling of spot the fact is he is a magnificent remarkable piece of
engineering and he's also an industrial robot and the care that should be taken
around him is the care you would take around any industrial robot which means
that it could hurt you if you do things wrong
for instance spot runs on 12 motors three in each shoulder to the control
the XY of the shoulder and one that controls the elbow and those motors are
all super powerful if you've got your finger between the motor and a place
that wanted to go your fingers gonna lose in that equation and all around the
perimeter of his body is nothing but pinch points in fact he has these handy
straps up here on the shoulders which are the safe places to be able to grab
spot however best practice is to always turn
off spots motors before you get anywhere near him all this is my way of saying
that you will see me exhibit some less-than-ideal practices with spot in
this video and that is because of the level of comfort I've achieved after
three or four months of working with him I just wanted you to know that up front
all right enjoy the video hey Adam here from Testim with another spot video now
we've been giving him skills and tasks so far and we have great plans for a
whole host of new skills and tasks in the future but we thought this video was
a good time to rewind a little bit and go back and talk about some of the basic
rudiments of how spot operates you guys have been submitting some great
questions about how we steer him how he died him exactly what his abilities are
and how autonomous he can be so get ready it's time for a little bit of spot
101
my main interface with spot is via this android-based tablet computer the handle
is my own design for ease of utilizing it and the first thing that happens when
you power him up is he creates his own wireless network and I connect to it
using this handset that's not the only way he can operate it's just the way
he's delivered out of the box so spot right now is upside down which means
that's why the camera shot of me is upside down but I'm gonna put him into
self-right mode and it's a set of protocols that he uses to stand up
there he is well good morning how are you
damn he's cute isn't he so spot right now is up and running and he is set to
all of his medium settings medium gate medium height medium speed and these are
all fabulous for controlling him in a moderated and balanced fashion you can
change his step height from normal to very tiptoe II or super high all of
those actually make him slightly less coordinated but again this is all just
out of the box he is basically a route platform at this point and I can control
how he walks I can control in a couple of different ways I can control him with
joysticks and with the joysticks I have two different controls the left control
can go forward and back left and right and the right hand control is simply
spin clockwise and counter clockwise so that is one of the main ways however I
want to be clear that even though I'm directly controlling him from these
joysticks he's still making a bunch of decisions on his own for instance if I
attempted to run him into that table he would not run into the table watch him
avoid it I am mashing the joystick forward and he
is not bound banging into any obstacles despite my attempts to get him to so
here I'm steering him right into the table and he is moving his way around
look at that did you see that he lifted his foot around the drainpipe again
realized that even though I'm controlling him what's going on inside
of him is way more complex than just an RC car following the direction you're
pointing he's making all sorts of assessments about his surroundings
so as I move him over the pallet if I move slowly he goes one foot at a time
and he is seeing the pallet understand that not only does he see the pallet and
his camera he also recognizes that it's a 3d object he actually can see where
his feet are gonna land on it and he can adjust his gait based on what his
anticipation of where those footfalls are gonna land now watch we try and
steer him into the wall and he's not gonna hit it he's just gonna stop he's
gonna keep on trying to find a way through the wall until he sees one and
since he's not gonna see one I'll just steer him back out again
now we can do the same thing with stairs I steer him into stairs and he only has
the mode of knowing that he's facing stairs and then he makes all the
decisions about how to get up
all right now I can change several parameters like I said he comes out of
the box running on medium everything here's a step height being normal here's
a step height being high and here's his step light step height being low I like
this one because it looks like he's tiptoeing also there's actually a really
interesting thing about his gait because all humans as you know or you might not
know but we walk by falling right there's this pendulum effect and there's
a little bit of a fall and his gait actually includes that unless you move
him very slowly and then he moves so that he's always over his center of
gravity so if I push very slowly you'll see that instead of two legs at a time
he'll start to move one leg at a time here we go that's it and this in this
way because he's moving so slowly he doesn't get any advantage from the
pendulum effect of his swinging his legs back and forth and thus he moves more
carefully to keep his balance also I'm running on medium speed so let's see if
I increase his speed this is his fastest speed everyone was wondering here it is
it's not that fast but it's about a normal human walk yeah whoa sorry about
that buddy oh but these aren't all the tricks up
his sleeves his sleeves he doesn't even have sleeves he can do a little bit of
dressage nope and while he's doing this
he can do everything you could normally do with them a little bit of dance
this is the gift there it is here's the boomerang
oh yeah one foot there we go
okay stop good boy these are some of the basic rudimentary skills spot has been
shipped with but again don't think of him as a robot think of him as the very
base level of a robotic platform so up till now I've been scaring him using the
joysticks forward reverse left-right but I actually don't even have to use that I
could use the video interface of what spot's sees in order to direct him so
I'm looking at his front cameras right now I'm gonna point to a spot on the
ground now he's gonna make his way there and as long as I keep pressing spots on
the ground spot figures out a way he wants to go get where I'm telling him to
go and again if I tried to steer him into something he is actually going to
avoid it here let's try and steer him over here into the wall there he is
stopping now if I want to get him out of this Jam the thing is I can actually
look at multiple cameras from him I can look out his left side his right side or
his backside and for his backside that's what I'm gonna do because I can't see
him right now if you look up I can't see him from here but let me push a spot
here and have him back in there is why hey buddy
so let's steer him around back towards us
and here you can see us and spot is walking right back towards us and again
I don't have to tell him how to navigate past this palette that he's walking into
I just have to point to the other side of it and he figures out a way to get
past it so the joysticks here are really the first out-of-the-box control
mechanism but they're also probably the first to go totally by the wayside if
spot is to actually have any real utility pointing to spots on the ground
as a sort of second level but there's a much deeper level of autonomy that spot
can have and that's what we're gonna look at next one of the very first
questions people ask me about him is is he like mapping the space that he's in
and the answer that is absolutely so the Boston
Dynamics team has actually built a system for spot to self orientate and
that is using these fiducials it looks like a QR code that's because that's
exactly what it is we print these out on eight-and-a-half by 11 sheets of paper
and because it's printed in this exact size on a hard piece of board spot when
he sees it in his camera notes what it is and can tell exactly his orientation
to and distance from it because he knows what size it should be so we're gonna
put a few of these around and give spot an autonomous mission
so I have placed these fiducials a dozen of them around the environment and we're
going to record spot walking through that environment and then play it back
and that will allow him to walk a path that we have predetermined how this
applies to the real world a civ spot had to deliver something from one part of a
factory floor to another or do something in terms of monitoring where I had to
walk the same path every day you'd put these fiducials around the space and
they would be how he would navigate that space I haven't actually tried it on
this scale before so let's go
so I've just recorded a mission for him going downstairs walking a circle coming
back upstairs and he is going to replay that mission but it's not like he
recorded exactly how I told him to walk that way he's gonna make his own
decisions about his gait and his cadence as we go so let's see how he does okay
here we go play oh right there he's walking backwards down the stairs it's
actually the more stable way for him to walk down stairs and I can talk about
that in a second but he just made his own call I walked him front way and he's
like now it's much easier for me to go backwards and that's how I'm gonna go
here he comes back upstairs
understand that when he is approaching stairs he can see them topographically
and each stair presents him a nice fat picture to put his foot on so walking up
stairs is relatively straightforward for him now if I turn him around and you
think about what he can see from this point of view come here
understand now that he's looking down and the sight picture of where his foot
can land here is much narrower because he doesn't have the full step this leg
right here inhibits his leg from hitting here so he has a much narrower picture
of each stair to walk down which is why he prefers to walk down stairs backwards
so I'm gonna turn him around and you'll see that backwards he has again a nice
fat sight picture for each stair and thus it's a lot more stable for him to
walk down stairs backwards
however like just understanding that he can see the stairs and choose where to
put his feet is freaking mind-blowing to me it's absolute magic okay now that
we've run him on a mission going up and down the stairs I think I want to try a
more specific mission form okay this is a more real-world scenario I've set up a
bunch of fiducials and a kind of a court here I'm gonna have spot walk up and
down this court and you'll see why in a little bit record new mission
alright spot you're gonna go forward
and you're gonna turn around and you're gonna walk back the stream same way and
then you're gonna turn around and you're gonna walk back the same way now I'm
gonna play the mission now it's time to talk about why I wanted to run him on
this mission this here is a bucket of bolts and nails and stuff that you don't
want in your parking lot this here is a magnetic pickup I'm gonna rig a little
duct tape tails so that spot can drag this behind him and clean up this
parking lot yeah okay what kind of parking lot are you guys running around
here look at all these nails everywhere this is a horror show
Wow ah if only there was somebody who could clean it all up
proof of concept yes he did not like the load on his back legs because I didn't
think through this rig too carefully but you get my point
you see the point he picked up the nails
so that is the basic set of rudimentary orientation and navigation skills spot
comes out of the box with and while it may seem pretty baseline it's also
insanely robust but it is the bottom level there's an API there are comport
there's all sorts of extra channels of proprioception and self orientation that
can be added and will be added by different developers under different
circumstances now we know a lot of you been asking how long does this battery
run we've been filming solid for about an hour and he's at about 30% the
working time is 90 minutes on a single battery charge and his payload how much
can he lift just a shade over 30 pounds all right well that's it spotting are
gonna go now please leave your comments and questions below we will try and
answer them we'll have some new skills for spot next month I think you're gonna
really appreciate them but now he's been very good for a long time I think it's
time to take him out for food
you