60 minutes overtime
this week on 60 minutes our story is
about boston dynamics which is a
cutting-edge robotics company
it was exciting to actually get inside
boston dynamics
nicole mark's producer has been working
on this for
literally for years to get inside there
you get a little sense like you're
peeking behind the curtain
and you know spots about 60 pounds we
interviewed mark rayburt who founded the
company
boston dynamics started on the set of
this 20th century fox movie outside of
l.a
called rising sun and we were providing
robots for the background of a scene
uh in the movie but only you have the
next generation of technology to do this
kind of work
and we were there for a week and it was
a week of hell
why was it a week of hell because
nothing worked you realized
it you had a lot more work to do we had
a lot more work to do
i think for a lot of people when you see
the videos of robots doing these things
i mean there's
it's clearly extraordinary and amazing
that's crazy
and to see it in person it's really
startling it's almost like it takes a
little while for your eyes to adjust to
what you're seeing
you know these are machines but because
they are
in animal form or human form because
their motion is so extraordinary
it's hard not to kind of
anthropomorphize them
and undeniably for a lot of people
there's also kind of a fear factor
involved i feel like every person who
makes robots in movies always
thinks it's going to be for the good and
i mean i hate to say this they usually
end up getting killed by the robots
themselves
you don't worry about that i mean that's
the movies what can i say
you know i hope people can see outside
that because you know there's a huge
opportunity
for the good things robots can do for us
you know i think that i think robots are
going to be our helpers
they're going to keep people from having
to go into very dangerous situations
you know we have a robot at chernobyl
making radiation measurements i mean do
you want a person
doing that so whereas hollywood might be
focused on the risks
i think the opportunities are huge and
it would be a shame
not to take advantage of those
opportunities that's how you see
the future robots i mean is it's
helpers and working in environments
that are not conducive to
humans working in or working alongside
humans
for productivity and in some cases doing
things people can't do
because of strength or precision things
yeah i think that's what
that's what they'll be used for it's
interesting to actually
drive spot it's actually very intuitive
and very easy
you can just kind of get it going in a
certain direction
so you're not really kind of doing much
of anything and that was kind of
probably one of the most interesting
things about driving the robots
i think there are three really key
pieces in robotics there is vision
there's mobility and there's
manipulation
kevin blankespoor is one of the lead
engineers of boston dynamics
it is interesting to see how difficult
it is to get a robot to do
even a quarter of all the things a human
being can do
yeah i mean all the things that we can
do that we just
take for granted we don't even think
about doing finding a box is so easy for
a human right you know you can walk in
with no training and tell me where all
the boxes are
it takes years of robotics development
to actually be able to do that
years years we've been working on all of
the pieces the vision the manipulation
mobility for
two decades uh and we're you know it's
the tip of the iceberg we're just
getting started
the thing i came away with is just
realizing how far
you know robotics still has to go in
order to actually
be able to really mirror human movements
or animal movements
some of the engineers have had spot in
their homes due to covid this past year
and they all say how large it is and how
noisy it is in a home setting
not something you realize kind of in a
big workshop or outdoors
so 50 years from now what's a robot
going to look like from
that boston dynamics puts out uh that's
a tough question
there's no doubt that today's robots
will look
um minimum compared to tomorrow's robots
i think the versatility of the robots
will be greatly enhanced
i think that the ease of giving them a
new task will be
uh greatly enhanced and you know it
won't be that long until you can talk to
it like you talk to alexa
and tell it what you want it to do and
it will understand more and more about
understanding what you have in mind
given the environment it's in
when you say not too far what do you
mean we've done experiments with talking
to spot
i don't think that's far away i think
having it understand complicated
situations and what you mean is a little
further out but you know in five years
you'll see
significant progress and we're working
on some designs right now
to achieve some of that