Dammit, there's a limit on the number of them you can purchase online at once.
Only two robots may be purchased through the online store.
Please request a quote to get in contact with a sales representative.
Spot® Explorer
Quantity: 101
Price $74,500.00
Total $7,524,500.00
Do they come painted in Dalmatian? How much is delivery? Do they deliver themselves?
These are really expensive, so I think chances are if you need more than 2 then they want to make sure you get a demo with engineers, probably custom contracts/pricing, etc. Probably a fraud prevention thing too given how much money it is.
I challenge it respectfully. I think that guideline and the reasons for it "semi-noob" illusion is condescending IMO.
Imagine a new user enters HN ecosystem. They write a complain about HN turning into Reddit - as they felt and observed. Then they go read the guideline that makes a fool out of them as "semi-noob". I don't think that kind of treatment belongs here.
I fully agree the wording isn't in line with the discouragement of ad homs, comes off condescending to a new user, and should be changed. We shouldn't stigmatize being new, though I do think a list of "stuff so stale you can drive nails with it" is pretty appropriate.
Please don't take my quote as my highlighting the noob bit, as it also made me cringe a little. It's an entirely reasonable opinion that you (and the person who vehemently took up your cause in the comment tree) want a more content-rich thread.
But you have to understand posting that opinion is at least 1:1 comment volume with the thing being complained about--so best case, 100% bloat--and it tends to start a N:1 tree under it, so N-hundred% bloat. What was one content-light joke that would've had a few light replies is now a big discussion and now the thread is very, very content-lean for on-topic discussion.
I think that's why that rule is there, not because your opinion is invalid. If it's really that much of a problem such that the downvotes won't do it, then we need to talk but most threads work fine. Further, complaining about the substance of a comment within the same thread is guaranteed to make the overall situation worse, no matter how valid the complaint, because of the above.
I realize I'm contributing to the content-leanness at this point too, by that definition. However, you do deserve a respectful explanation as to why I felt it was appropriate to reply, and the apology for quoting the poorly-worded rule without trying to somehow acknowledge that. I should have, and I am sorry about that.
I realize that and regret posting it now with all these replies that have nothing to do with BD robots. :-(
Thanks for the explanation and I can see why this whole complaining bit gets old and chewed upon over years. I've personally not stumbled upon anyone that complains about HN turning into Reddit.
Also, I feel out of place because I don't own this forum, don't have a stake in HN moderation and its workings. I don't think I have the right to complain in the first place.
Just felt like saying at the time and it felt right. Appreciate your thoughts and clarification.
We've gained nothing from this comment. It is a joke about robots taking over the world. $7.4M number was put in the comment deliberately to get attention and then proceeding to inquire whether it comes in Dalmatian spots painted over. Will they deliver themselves? Perhaps I should respond with "haha"? What should I say?
If this isn't Reddit, may be I need to go there again, perhaps things have improved?
I come on HN to get away from jokes, especially of the type in the parent comment. Allow this and then the top comment in every thread on HN is some form a joke. The internet is filled to the brim with entertainment and jokes. It is nice to come here on HN and participate in intellectual, curious and informative discussion. A little humor here and there is fine.
You cannot realistically expect that all commenters adjust to your particular likes or dislikes. Ironic, because that is exactly how many redditors think.
My impression of the intended rules is that comments need to have "substance" as to constructively carry a conversation. Pointing relevant things out like the price, and making a comment in the form of a joke is perfectly normal in a conversation. You might not have a response but other's may, and indeed you can see a few people continuing the joke for fun.
It's the comments that have no substance, the "no you're wrong" kind that doesn't actually _say_ anything, or specifically baiting for heated responses in flame wars that are issues.
You might not like the jokes, but this type are definitely allowed.
Your robophobic attitude puts you at grave risk of robot attack in the coming AI Revolution, so you should seriously consider Old Glory Robot Insurance.
> It is a joke about robots taking over the world. $7.4M number was put in the comment deliberately to get attention and then proceeding to inquire whether it comes in Dalmatian spots painted over
Did you actually miss the 101 Dalmations reference the joke was actually making? I thought it was super clever and nuanced. Much superior to Reddit.
I remember watching the price of laser printers drop. I was in a computer store once and I was examining a $10,000 model once. A salesman approached and I told him once the price drops below $1500 I am getting one. He actually laughed at me and a nearby customer weighed in I'd be waiting for a lifetime or more.
Truth is I think it was three or four years before I bought a $1495 LaserJet, still have it in fact. So when Spot drops to $7500 I am getting one, just to freak out my neighbors!
Where I live people try to one up each other with exotic breeds of dog. I want to just blow peoples minds as I call it with my smartphone, it descends the stairs and then opens the door for me. Then I ask them, can your dog do that?
Secretly I want one so I can write code to teach it 'tricks' :<).
When I worked at best buy in early college I remember at $15,000 50 inch LCD. Hung there for like a year until a model half the price replaced it and actually started selling.
One of the strangest things I've ever seen was Boston Dynamics doing a Spot demo at a VC summer party at the same time somebody was demoing their next-gen Twitch-streaming drone that could circle around an object (Spot). Spot strutted about while the drone flew around it and streamed the strut to the internet.
All the VCs were rushing to stream themselves while I was thinking "am I seeing the next-gen war technology?"
>> RoboMaster is an annual intercollegiate robot competition held in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, founded and hosted by the drone tech giant DJI. First started in 2015, it is the brainchild of DJI's founder and CEO Frank Wang, and jointly sponsored by the Communist Youth League Central Committee, the All-China Students' Federation (ACSF) and the Shenzhen City Government. It is the first shooting sport-style robotics competition in China.
There are a number of these types of collegiate competitions in China. A student was telling me about one he was working on where you had to optimize missile trajectories to avoid radar detection.
>Pauline founded SRL in 1978 and it is considered the premier practitioner of "industrial performing arts", and the forerunner of large scale machine performance. SRL is known for producing the most dangerous shows on earth. Although acknowledged as a major influence on popular competitions pitting remote-controlled robots and machines against each other, such as BattleBots and Robot Wars, Pauline shies away from rules-bound competition preferring a more anarchic approach. Machines are liberated and re-configured away from the functions they were originally meant to perform.
>"With the character of outlaw underground robot maker Slick Henry, William Gibson has immortalized artist Mark Pauline in the novel MONA LISA OVERDRIVE." -Thinking Like a Machine: An Artists Journey into Robotics
>"Pauline builds engines of destruction. He is the founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories, a loosely knit organization which, since 1979, has been perfecting a heavy metal theater of cruelty-scary, stupefyingly loud events in which remote-controlled weaponry, computer-directed robots, and reanimated roadkill do battle in the murk of smoke, flames, and greasy fumes." -Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century
>Survival Research Laboratories Live at the Extreme Futurist Festival, LA, California, Dec 22, 2012. This is the public YouTube debut of this documentary, four years in the making. It chronicles the planning, pre-production, and performance of a full Survival Research Labs show, captured by nineteen cameras.
Recommending there to be no glass in the environment makes sense for liability, but I would have thought a few ultrasound detectors would be sufficient for gross collision avoidance e.g. to avoid walking into a pane. Similarly forward/down-looking sensors should be able to detect ground plane discontinuities. I guess the stereo isn't robust enough to do that reliably.
Yes, that surprised me, too. Cliff detection isn't that hard. They seem to have cameras in the nose area that are positioned to see whether there's a walkable surface ahead. The basic vision system is cameras with IR projection of a pattern, like the original Kinect. How can they do foot placement on stairs while unable to detect cliffs?
There's an optional LIDAR vaguely mentioned in the instructions. No specs on field of view or range, though.
"Spot’s joints can pinch fingers and other body parts and entangle loose clothing, long hair, and jewelry. Only handle Spot when the motors are locked out or robot power is off. Fingers may break or get amputated if caught in joints while Spot’s motors are active." Were pinch points not considered during design?
Jogging/trotting is only available in "demo mode", and is listed as "less stable".
Boston Dynamics can do better than this. I was expecting full Big Dog capability in a smaller package. Maybe this is just the minimum viable product for a market test. If someone finds a use case for this robot, the next model should have those problems fixed.
It's fairly difficult to design a joint with a reasonable amount of motion without pinch points. Though, I'm kinda shocked they don't have detection for current spikes on the controllers so they can limit the damage to anything that is pinched.
End of the day though, how often is the plan to cohabitate a space with humans? My understanding is it is more designed to do monitoring and inspection with maybe some light manipulation tasks. If there's a person along with it why not just have the person do the inspection?
The demo videos have people reasonably close to the robot.[1][2]
It may be difficult to eliminate pinch points, but they need to protect them somehow in the next version. Pinch detectors, bellows, etc. Shear points, where there's a scissors action, should be eliminated.
"Spot is not certified safe for in-home use or intended for use near children or others who may not appreciate the hazards associated with its operation."
Could a grown man ride it like a horse? This is such a cool, unknown, yet obvious technology but I have no idea what I would use it for. Rescuing people from volcanos? Bringing you a beer? Robot dog races or fights? This is obviously designed for industrial and rescue uses, but I think it could be most successful in the entertainment industry (don't know how ethical that would be though)
As others have said you can't directly ride it (the max payload is too low), but Adam Savage did manage to hook it up to a rickshaw and ride it that way: https://youtu.be/zyaocKS3sfg?t=1358
Max weight = 14 kg total (30.9 lbs)
Mounting area = 850 mm (L) x 240 mm (W) x 270m m (H)
Mounting interface = M5 T-slot rails
Connector = DB25 (2 ports)
Power supply = Unregulated DC 35-58.8V, 150W per port
Integration = Available software API and hardware interface control documentation
You'd need 4 -5 of them holding up a palanquin that you sit on.
sibling comment said max weight is 30.9 lbs per SPOT.
So go on a diet, do some ascetic yoga, get down to 150 lbs or so. and then get 4-5 of them holding up your royal vessel.
Some comments here show the max payload is too low. But I've had the same thoughts, so what does it take to scale Spot to the size/max payload of a horse?
They had a horse sized payload with the Legged Squad Support system.[1] It worked, but the Marines tried it and it wasn't useful enough. They ended up going with a small ATV for supplies.
(Too noisy, too. A subcontractor was supposed to produce a small, quiet Diesel to power a generator and hydraulic pump, but that never happened. Probably because a small, quiet Diesel is hard. The US military runs on one fuel, JP-8, which works in both aircraft and Diesel engines, so to deploy this, it had to run on JP-8)
So the problem they seem to be solving is slowly moving small things short distances across really rough terrain with a power source nearby. I don't see these flying off the shelves.
The bulk of everything else it does could probably be done better with a drone. The only big win for the dog-bot is the 31 pound carry capacity but... I'm not even sure how that is super useful.
Indoor environments where a flying creature is a real hazard, especially since you can't have a drone above people (typically) but you can have a dog robot walking around as long as it's not so slow that it blocks stairs/doorways.
Spot with no load (or minimal load) seems to be pretty fast? I could imagine it could do useful checks around a construction area or an empty building and alert someone if something is off - "Hey, operator, a door was opened and now it's closed."
Obviously it's early tech, we're going to see first wave adopters who have an appetite for experimentation.
Much like drones are much better at most outdoor operations, wheeled robots are much better at most indoor operations. Yes, stairs, etc etc... but if a company has a big enough need for investing in robotics, it's likely they will be willing to invest in the infrastructure (ramps, etc) to support those robots.
Also, consider for a moment the following from Boston Dynamics:
> Spot should always be operated at least two meters away from people
That alone eliminates something like 95% of workplaces.
Flying drones have major endurance issues, especially if they need to carry anything beyond an extra battery. This can last 90 minutes on a 4.2 kg battery and presumably extend that to 4.5 hours at the cost of ~60% carrying capacity. Drones also have trouble applying forces do do stuff like open doors.
75k seems like a much bugger issue in terms of general use, but that can probably drop a lot over time.
What's the point of lasting 3 times longer if you are moving 5-10 times slower? Even if you double the endurance of the Spot, you are still covering the same amount of ground that a much more affordable drone could cover.
At 75,000$ using a person is almost always going to be a better solution right now. Even above 20k I suspect it’s mostly just people doing R&D. However, that is kind of like looking at the first version of the segway and ignoring the cheap ”hoveboards” that showed up at 1/60th the price. At say 1,000$ you can bet some people would use them for dog walking.
> However, that is kind of like looking at the first version of the segway and ignoring the cheap ”hoveboards” that showed up at 1/60th the price. At say 1,000$ you can bet some people would use them for dog walking.
The Segway was from the get go a product with immediate and obvious uses. It didn't take off the way Kamen thought it would, but it was a product. This by contrast is barely a product at all, it's almost 100% a research tool. Even most of the people who use this thread suggest as much.
I’m pretty sure the main use is observing dangerous environments like mines, places with toxic waste, and oil rigs. The payload will usually be used for sensors or a door opening device, not to transport cargo.
> observing dangerous environments like mines, places with toxic waste, and oil rigs.
This could be a good use. Mines in particular where drones would be impractical. I'm not so sure about oil rigs, while Spot would be great on the stairs/ terrain, it has trouble with seeing the edge of cliffs and might well march right off into the ocean.
Probably the biggest advantage would be the ability to take samples or hold some kind of special equipment.
In fact, there is a startup called Exyn Technologies which tackles the problem of deploying autonomous drones in mines and other such dangerous environments (https://www.exyn.com/)!
- litter collection in parks, beaches, and ravines
- job site tool delivery / mobile tool caddie
- mobile vending at music festivals if those ever happen again
- archaeological / mineral exploration
- wildlife conservation and monitoring
- strawberry, tomato and other low to the ground fruit picking
The quadruped cases are different from the bipedal cases.
The surveillance and security use cases aren't that interesting because to me those use cases are like the woodworking and electronics equivalents of clocks and ashtrays. You could train it to avoid people, and just be a wandering background sensor array for things like volatile chemicals in airport and public transport settings, etc.
All of those tasks seem much cheaper to accomplish with people.
Also I'd love to meet a workman who would prefer to have a $75k caddy, rather than simply buying $25k worth of new tools and getting up himself to go grab them whenever needed.
I think you may be mistaken; Raibert said in 2018 that there would be commercial availability in 2019. I think this is simply the delayed fulfillment of that commercial availability timetable.
Some of these devices have been with potential customers (including police) for several months now. And the product has been in development in this form since 2016, or far longer if you consider it an extension of other quadruped robots from Boston Dynamics. There's already been a fair bit of R&D.
Perhaps what you mean is that the price will drop when demand grows. I'm sure that Raibert is hoping the same.
Probably also features the plasticky hollow frail feeling of most chinese knockoffs. Still, if anybody wants to buy 7 of these and pit them against 1 Spot, I'd watch that :)
So amazon could load 10 of these in a self driving truck and do same day/all night delivery 24/7. They'd only need to figure out a way to get the dogs to pick up and drop the packages. The truck could leave the 'procurement center' loaded with all the packages and make the rounds. The dogs could recharge whenever they return to the truck.
You'll likely see these things augmenting expensive skilled employees by carrying their engine driven welders and air compressors around job-sites before you see them doing low margin delivery work. Most technology moves from high margin industries (where the cost per operating hour of an employee is higher and therefore easier to beat) to low margin industries.
At 30lb payload, it's not carrying any welder or compressor I've ever worked with. More like fetching a socket from the toolbox that's not quite in reach, but to accomplish those sorts of small and somewhat random tasks is going to require quite a bit more NLP than we've been able to do so far.
That's an incredible idea, and the question isn't "What's the lowest hourly wage they could pay someone across the internet to control one of these dogs?" but "How much would people be willing to pay for the fun of completing 'missions' where they guide the dog to a customer's front door and back?"
> Are there limits to what I am allowed to do with Spot?
> Spot should never be used to harm or intimidate any person or animal or for any illegal or ultra-hazardous purpose. Our warranty of Spot becomes void and we may disable some or all of its functionality upon any such use.
It's good that they have this language. My first thought was that some rich asshole would want to "release the hounds" on unwanted visitors, only with machine-gun-equipped deathbots rather than abused, hungry Dobermanns.
It may not be so good if this means they can actually monitor robot use in order to enforce this requirement?
Of interest is that access to the Performance Log is required at "license renewal time [...] before a new key will be issued."
I've not seen other info about their licensing terms but am curious to read those if somebody has a link to those details.
According to the Spot Privacy Notice, Performance Log includes:
- Your robot’s serial number.
- Information about usage such as how long the robot has been operated, how far it walked, how many times it fell, how often a particular API was used.
- When key events like powering on or fault detection occurred.
- Safety-related data such as collisions or falls.
- Usage of the controller application.
- High-level information about maps you collect, such as how many waypoints, how they’re connected, how well Spot understands where it is.
- Details about communications loss events.
Q:
Who will have access to my data?
A:
Access to your data will be limited to Boston Dynamics customer support and individuals related to improving the product.
Q:
Under what circumstances is Spot data transmitted to Boston Dynamics?
A:
Service Logs: Only when explicitly sent by you as part of a service request.
Performance Logs: Regularly and automatically, whenever the tablet is connected to the Internet. [emphasis added]
Q:
Does Boston Dynamics retain my data?
A:
Service Logs: Deleted when a service ticket is resolved.
Performance Logs: Yes, this data is retained as long as it is necessary for performance improvements to Spot robots.
Q:
What if I don’t use the tablet or Android app with Spot?
A:
If you have a Spot Explorer we’ll ask you for your Performance Log at license renewal time. At that point you will have to use Spot’s Android App to transfer the log before a new key will be issued. [emphasis added]
Q:
Does Spot require Internet access?
A:
No. In order to facilitate transmission of diagnostic data we do require you to periodically connect your tablet to the robot, which automatically transfers the data from the robot, and then connect that tablet to the Internet.
Asimov's laws are only good for a lifetime writing career in exploring their exceptions. Is there any Asimov story where the laws were applied strictly and successfully? I don't remember one.
I think most of the Robot stories are used to illustrate the woeful logical contradictions in simplistic rule sets. You might be able to extend this idea to how we as people follow the law, whether natural or political.
> I think most of the Robot stories are used to illustrate the woeful logical contradictions in simplistic rule sets.
Literally all of them (from what I remember; it's been awhile since I've read the collection) revolve around problems caused specifically by trying to circumvent or modify the Three Laws, the moral of the stories being "This is why the Three Laws in their specific ordering are necessary for robotics to not bring about the demise of humanity".
A _continous_ 9 hour work day. You could alternatively just program it for a 24 hour work cycle, and get the same 9 hour work day on a single battery in segments instead.
EDIT: Nevermind. I assumed that it had the capabilities to dock and charge by itself (just like any robot vacuum does), but apparently it doesn't.
I would hazard a guess of proprietary form factor and handling needs since these aren't mounted in a car chassis, combined with low production volumes initially.
You might get away with 3 (depending on load), but then you would need an additional charger ($1360 each). But there was a reason I use the ~ symbol =). Personally if I were doing this I would get more chargers, but it is really up to the use case. Either way, assuming 5,000 hours/year, you are looking around $20-30/hour of effective cost (depending on what you count for “everything else)
I just love robots, and I’ve purchased a few, but I just never had the time to play around with trying to build my own so I’m a bit naive of what is state of the art and how quickly we can expect it to advance. Maybe when my son is a bit older I will get to build some with him.
I have a robot vacuum which actually does an Ok job on the first floor despite the software being extremely naive. I have a robot lawnmower which, after laying the guide wire, does an incredible job on a fairly complex half acre and was worth every penny, and also accomplishes its task with surprising naïveté.
So far the success of robots seems to be in finding ways to reduce a seemingly complex task into a random walk.
I dream of robots doing all sorts of helpful things. Big robots that help me move stuff around the house (and maybe even up the stairs?). Little robots that can unclog a drain. Ridiculous gyroscoping telescoping robots that scoot around the kitchen and put away the dishes from the dishwasher in perfect stacks way up on the highest shelf.
Specs say Spot weighs 70lbs and can hold 30lbs.
2:1 seems actually... not bad. What’s the chance the tech evolves to 1:1 in 10 years? Is weight to payload ratio even a reasonable metric?
I feel like the three big things are 1) degrees of freedom, 2) torque, 3) finesse.
I don’t really have a good grasp of how much the problem is breaking down at either the software or the hardware level where I’ve never seen a robot that could really do all 3, even if it was a totally preprogrammed hard-coded action.
For researchers like me it’s an easy way to get a legged robot that just works for fairly cheap. One can then focus on perception/decision/control etc. without being a mechanical engineer.
You can always buy and mount the lidar yourself. It is cheap for a working legged robot of this quality. Others (anymal comes to mind) are much more than that.
Not sure this take feels right but it doesn't really feel sufficient to say "this time is different" either. It's pretty easy to come up with dozens of military based use cases but really difficult to find commercial ones. Possible use cases for say delivery still rely on human drivers (in delivery vans) or tele-operators for example so it's not clear there's a business case for using them.
This seems like the mother of all selection biases to me. Of course you remember the Apple ][ because it was one of the first products in what became a wildly successful market. How many flying car prototypes do you remember? There have been several, and a whole new batch of electric versions are being designed right now, but so far people have been quite rightly skeptical of that product for the last 70+ years.
Okay, I get they need to amortize R&D, but $1275 for a hunk of plastic with two ports and some wires coming out of it? Did they fill it with diamonds or something? Very curious about the BOM on that, given that it looks like it costs less than a dollar to make.
There is a European company with a similar robot (sorry, can't remember the name, but I have seen the robot up close). They actually have a business model! (BD's business model seems to be asking the DOD for more research funds....)
Anyway, this other company leases them for plant inspections -- think large chemical processing plant inspections. Currently, some person in a hard-hat wanders around the plant looking at gauges and sniffing for leaks every hour. Robot can carry a back-pack full of gas sensors, and a camera that can look at a 25-year-old gauge and feed computer vision OCR software that turns that into a data log.
Did Royal Caribbean ever get the robotic bartenders to actually work? When I got to see one in action several years ago it spent far more time either outright down or in a half broken state where it messed up orders than it did actually working. Not to mention it being much slower than a human bartender when it was operational.
Depends on the country and what they're guarding. Most places you can only fire on people to protect humans and not property so if Spot is the only one there it won't matter anyway.
Plus it could probably kick the shit out of someone if the software allowed it.
A robot that works a 1% the rate is still cost effective if he's 0.9% of the price. Those helicopters are hired at hundreads of thousands of Euros per day and billed for minutes -- they can lift a lot of the materials in a single trip. Probably will have to wait for a more heavy duty Spot though for this use case.
a human porter can carry 30lbs and hike through any mountain trails that this robot can - it'd be a lot cheaper to hire some people than to buy a $70k robot. people can also operate for longer than 90 minutes.
the helicopters are necessary because they need to carry large loads that can't be divided up, which a robot with a 30lb capacity can't help with.
Well, some technology can't be replicated by living creatures... I could hire 10,000 book-keepers and they still wouldn't be as fast or as accurate at handling my company's finances than an old pirated copy of Quickbooks.
On the other hand, would I spend $7,000 on a state of the art sex doll? I'd probably just head to the bar, spend $50 or so on drinks, and take home a female human.
But, I'm cheap...
Some will spend the $75k to have an automated quadruped robot fetch them their sex doll.
As for me, I'll just bring my little chihuahua to the bar, use him to flirt with some girl, and head home with the dog, the girl, and some beer all for much less than $75k.
If you consider that owning a real dog costs roughly 30000$ for 10 years, this isn't that expensive. Of course, the price will drop considerably within the next few years and AI will improve a lot, so in 15 years it may be really common to own a robot dog. Real dogs will be for rich people.
The snake scene of the original Bladerunner movie always struck me as prophetic, where Deckard asks if the snake is real and Zhora replies: "Of course it's not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?"
Does anyone know what kind of motor/drive Spot uses? How do they get that precision/torque/speed? Brushless motors + planetary gears + high res optical/magnetic encoders + software for backlash compensation?
I wonder what the software looks like. Is it open source? What kind of network connectivity does it need? What kind of training is needed to program the robot?
The price feels low to me, people pay more for cars.
It's harder to get actors to respond realistically to an animated robot than a physical one. Depending on what you want, I could well see this being cheaper and easier. At the limit, consider if you only need stuff it can do out of box, and BD will lend you one for promotional purposes or you can resell it with minimal depreciation.
If you had read the thread, at least half the comments (many of which posted hours before you) say exactly that (like every time when someone says "unpopular opinion but..."), and without any sort of argumentation your comment doesn't really tell anyone anything.
Judging by the other comments ("Finally! Something to retrieve a socket wrench from all the way across the room!"), my view that this robot is utterly useless is indeed an unpopular opinion. This is HN and people love the "oh look this is so tech" kind of story. The whole startup scene is about it. I'm not seeing a ton of other people who said the same thing prior to my comment, but to placate you I edited my comment to remove the "unpopular" part. I would ask that you reply to what I say, rather than the specific wording. If I may point it out, your comment critiqued my choice of words while totally ignoring the point I stated.
The argument is: these things are useless in the real world.
This argument is falsifiable: come up with a use case for this robot that is real-world reasonable given the price point and other practical considerations.
If BD is charging $75k for a product that has been in development im one form or another for 10+ years, it seems reasonable that the burden is on BD to prove it's a useful product.
Judging by the history of the product, it seems clear that it's a novelty item. The DoD turned its back on the very loud BigDog, and Google handed BD off to Softbank when they weren't able to answer the question, "so, how do we make money from selling this robot to consumers?"
You can buy three Ford pickup trucks, brand spanking new, for the price of one of these robots.
Boston Dynamics isn't exactly a company that makes products. They are a bunch of researchers who turn money into technology. That technology may involve impressive robotic motion, but not every impressive thing is useful to consumers.
There's a very strong sense among many robotics weenies at MIT that, if you make cool stuff, the DoD or some major corporation will eventually reward you with money that allows you to make more cool stuff. That sense is embodied by Boston Dynamics, in my mind. It doesn't translate to a useful product, whether intended for the consumer, commercial applications, or heavy industry.
And the dangerous bit is that this engineering philosophy of "find someone who will pay us to keep making cool useless stuff" only serves to create tools for the over-funded, which in our society means militaries, police, and other anti-human actors. So the most likely use of this product, if there is any use at all, is a destructive and anti-people application. But I don't think it's very useful even for those purposes, because of price, fragility, need to recharge, light payload, etc.
Be honest. Can you think of any specific application where this product is better than something else (including human labor) that can be bought for $75k?
> Be honest. Can you think of any specific application where this product is better than something else (including human labor) that can be bought for $75k?
I never said that I could, I wasn't being dishonest before.
1) That's a fake video, made by a visual effects company.
2) Google already bought Boston Dynamics, realized they had no idea what they were doing, and sold Boston Dynamics to another large, wealthy, easily confused organization (SoftBank).
