Is that their business? They've been around for 30+ years and I don't think they've ever successfully commercialized a product. So far as I can tell, they just hop from DARPA grant to DARPA grant and make cool videos of the results.
I don't have any particular problem with that, but its a little weird? I figured they were a more traditional industrial robotics company that just did the humanoid robots as a side line for publicity, but googling, I guess that's not the case.
They have been on the bleeding edge of autonomous robotics R&D for a very long time now. If they were more focused on commercialization for the past 20 years then they wouldn't have pushed the tech forward as far and as fast as they have.
The whole point of the article is speculating that they are specifically retiring their hydraulic robot because it was never going to be commercially viable. Which makes it look like they are finally ready to pivot from pure R&D to commercial production. Thus they want fully electronic robots instead of hydraulics that are messy and require more (almost constant?) maintenance.
I'm not an engineering guy but I assume the hydraulics were more useful for pushing the boundaries of possible motion with such a heavy, robust, and versatile design. Now that the AI systems controlling vision, motion, proprioception/spatial awareness, etc are more fully developed, they can create more specialized and scaled down versions of the robot for specific applications that are lighter and don't require hydraulics to perform their tasks reliably? Just guessing here, am happy to be corrected or given more a nuanced take.
My ex worked at a company where their head grant writer was making as much or more than the CEO because all their revenue came from grants and they were terrified he was going to leave. They just kept throwing money at him.
Boston Dynamics needs a sugar daddy to subsidize them. First it was DARPA. Then Google. Now Hyundai. Their real achievement is that their management has been able to keep the money flowing for three decades.
boston dynamics is a govt psyop whose sole purpose as a company is to familiarize society with seeing robots before for the military & police industrial complex uses them to control us.
it's quite literally succeeding at it in front of our faces.
this is why their core product is video demos laced with cynical terror disguised as humorous pop culture references.
Pack it in boys! We've got one layer of abstraction here! Nothing to see here. It's not like the vast majority of "above board" companies don't have multiple layers of foreign shell companies and a dizzying array of abstraction.
Spot seems to be a genuine product for routine inspection now. By the looks of that promo video they have at least an extensive trial deployment at Chevron.
