- Hi, I'm Russell and this is Spot.
(happy music)
So you've probably seen this robot before,
maybe hauling a truck
or dancing to Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk."
♪ And my band 'bout that money ♪
♪ Break it down ♪
♪ Girls hit your hallelujah ♪
It's the first of this generation
of semi-autonomous, four-legged robots.
And it does a lot more than just make videos for the internet.
For about a month now,
Boston Dynamics has been putting Spot to work,
leasing units out to industry partners,
and seeing how this kind of robot holds up in the real world.
(happy mellow music)
When you're standing next to Spot,
the striking thing is how small and sturdy it is.
It's just under three feet high and weighs 70 pounds,
which means it's light enough
for a single person to pick up.
A lot of the movements you're seeing here
are remote controlled by an operator.
But Spot has a handful of basic skills
it can do automatically.
It knows how to climb stairs, how to avoid walls,
and even knows how to dance a little.
(funky music)
(heavy breathing)
Spot's not tired at all.
Of course, we've seen walking robots before,
but few of them had Spot's sense of balance.
Accelerometers tell Spot if it's moving,
and torque sensors in the joints
tell it exactly how its weight is distributed.
If Spot feels itself tipping forward,
a protocol kicks in, telling it to find surer foot.
It also has cameras on all four sides,
so it can see where to plant its foot.
Spot still can't tell the difference
between firm ground and loose dirt,
which means navigating these dirt piles
got a little chaotic.
When it does fall, there's a protocol for righting itself,
which works most of the time.
Although, it did need human assistance
when we flipped it into the bottom
of a particularly steep ditch.
The simplest way to use Spot is this controller,
which uses the same layout as an Xbox.
The left joystick moves Spot forward and back,
or strafes left and right,
while the right joystick spins it around.
You can also use the camera view to see what Spot is seeing,
and send it to specific waypoints.
Tap a spot on the screen,
and Spot will find a way to get there.
The controls are really easy to learn,
mostly because there isn't that much to control,
so much of it's automatic.
Within a couple of minutes,
I was able to send Spot wherever I wanted,
although it does stop at walls
because of the object sensor.
At the same time,
I didn't get the tight connection
that you do with video games or RC cars.
You can tell it's more designed for automation
than human pilots.
Boston Dynamics is hoping that a lot of the time,
Spot won't need a driver at all.
For more complicated tasks,
you can chain waypoints together,
sending Spot to retrace a path
it walked through earlier with human assistance.
That could mean checking all the gauges on an oil rig,
or taking LIDAR scans of a room
from a dozen specific points.
This version of Spot mostly knows how to navigate spaces,
but the plan is for it to carry more sophisticated tools
on its back, like a zoomable camera
or the claw it uses to open doors.
Industry partners can also build their own modules
for more specialized jobs.
Attach a methane detector module,
and Spot can check a whole facility for gas leaks.
Attach a LIDAR rig,
and Spot can make a 3D map
of a whole building from the inside.
It's a completely new way for computer programs
to interact with the physical world, automating tasks that would
otherwise be impossible to do without a human being.
There's also just straight-up entertainment.
It's really fun to watch this kind of robot
do these precise movements,
particularly if you have 10 or 15 of them in unison.
It's not hard to imagine 50 Spots
dancing Pikachu-style in a theme park.
Right now, Boston Dynamics has about 60 beta units.
That's the yellow guy you're seeing here,
but they've already started building the next generation,
which is what they're loaning out.
Eventually, they're hoping to have a thousand of them,
but right now there's only about 20 being leased out.
Now, Boston Dynamics wouldn't say
exactly what those bots are doing,
since most of the partnerships are still confidential.
They also didn't tell us exactly how much the robots cost,
since technically Spot isn't for sale.
All they've told us
is that the leases were in the range
of what you'd pay to lease a car, which doesn't say much.
One thing we have to talk about,
and there's really no other word for it, is the creepiness.
Some people get really freaked out by Spot.
It moves with a precision
that we don't see in the natural world.
And it stops dead still whenever it doesn't have a task,
which can be unsettling.
When you watch these videos,
there are all sorts of comments about how these robots
are going to rise up and destroy humanity.
There was even a Black Mirror episode about it.
But I didn't get that sense in person.
Really Spot doesn't recognize people at all.
For the robot, you're just an obstacle
that's too big to step on.
At the same time,
Boston Dynamics is really concerned about any situation
where Spot might end up harming a person.
Even if it's just getting your hand pinched
by one of the joints.
They also said that they didn't want to sell
to any clients who would use Spot to harm people,
or build weapons modules or anything like that,
which was good to hear.
Spot's great at climbing through piles of dirt,
but it doesn't have the social skills
to navigate big crowds.
And Boston Dynamics has a lot of work to do
before it can build those skills.
But that does mean that for now,
you're probably not going to see Spot anywhere
with lots of people around.
The company's thinking about construction sites,
oil rigs, maybe a few movie sets,
but those are all pretty tightly controlled spaces.
For now, Spot's really just a platform.
A stable base where partners can build new modules
and new software skills.
Once people start building on that platform,
Spot's going to get smarter fast,
and we may start seeing robots in places we never expected.
(robotic sounds)