The Artificial Intelligence Channel

Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, is developing advanced robots that can gallop like a cheetah, negotiate 10 inches of snow, walk upright on two legs and even open doors and deliver packages. Marc Raibert founded Boston Dynamics in 1992.

That science fiction future where robots can do what people and animals do may be closer than you think.

“I love building robots. And my long-term goal is to build robots that can do what people and animals do. And there’s three things in particular that we’re interested in. One is balance and dynamic mobility, the second one is mobile manipulation, and the third one is mobile perception.
I think it won’t be too long until we have robots like this in our homes, and one of the big needs is to take care of the aging and invalids. I think that it won’t be too long till we’re using robots to help take care of our parents, or probably more likely, have our children help take care of us. And there’s a bunch of other things. I think the sky’s the limit. Many of the ideas we haven’t thought of yet, and people like you will help us think of new applications.”

So what about the dark side? What about the military? Are they interested?

“Sure, the military has been a big funder of robotics. I don’t think the military is the dark side myself, but I think, as with all advanced technology, it can be used for all kinds of things.”

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The SpotMini is a four-legged robot that was developed to learn what is possible with a mobile manipulation platform.

Operations lead Seth Davis gave us a little insight into what makes this dog-like robot tick.

“Hi, I’m Seth Davis and I’m the operations lead at Boston Dynamics. SpotMini is a four-legged robot with an arm on it. And we developed this robot to learn what was possible with a mobile manipulation platform. So mobile in the sense that it’s got four legs and it can go inside of a house or on rough terrain. And manipulation in that we use the mobile base to put the arm where we want to do work. And then we have this arm that can actually pick up things, put them down, and do real work inside of a home, inside of a business, just out in the real world.”

“For demos like this, the robot is semiautomated. I’m giving it very basic commands with my Xbox controller. If I tell it to walk forward, it walks forward. The robot’s making all of its own decisions about what to do with the feet. And when I move the arm, I’m just giving very basic commands to move the arm forward or back, move the arm side to side, and the robot’s making all the decisions about what to do with each individual motor to make that happen. For a real-world application, you’d want that to be fully-autonomous or at least done by somebody who’s not in the same location. And we’re working on that right now as well.”

Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics takes the stage with Darrell Etherington to chat about how to teach a robot and his plans for the future before bringing one onstage for a quick demo.

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