Robotics maker cultivates plans
Boston Dynamics dabbling in range of service machines
BOSTON — It’s never been clear whether robotics company Boston Dynamics is making killing machines, household helpers, or something else entirely.
For nine years, the secretive firm — which got its start with U.S. military funding — has unnerved people around the world with Youtube videos of experimental robots resembling animal predators.
In one, a life-size robotic wildcat sprints across a parking lot at almost 20 miles an hour. In another, a small wheeled rover nicknamed Sandflea abruptly flings itself onto rooftops — and back down again.
CEO Marc Raibert, the company’s 68-year-old-founder, agreed to a brief interview at a robotics conference in late May. Raibert had just demonstrated the machine that will be the company’s first commercial robot in its 26-year history: the doglike, door-opening Spotmini, which Boston Dynamics plans to sell to businesses as a camera-equipped security guard next year.
The company hasn’t announced a price for the battery-powered robots, which weigh about the same as a Labrador retriever. Raibert said it plans to manufacture 1,000 Spotminis annually.
Speculation about Boston Dynamics’ intentions — weapons or servants? — spikes every time it releases a video. The Spotmini straddles that divide, and Raibert told the AP he doesn’t rule out future military applications. But he played down popular fears that his company’s robots could one day be used to kill.
“We think about that, but that’s also true for cars, airplanes, computers, lasers,” Raibert said, wearing his omnipresent Hawaiian shirt as younger robotics engineers lined up to speak with him. “Every technology you can imagine has multiple ways of using it. If there’s a scary part, it’s just that people are scary. I don’t think the robots by themselves are scary.”
The firm’s previous military projects included a four-legged robotic pack mule that could haul supplies across deserts or mountains — but which was reportedly deemed too noisy by the U.S. Marines.
Interviews with eight former Boston Dynamics employees and some of Raibert’s former collaborators suggest the company has long brushed aside commercial demands.
Raibert’s vision was kept alive for years through military contracts, especially from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A federal contracting database lists more than $150 million in defense funding to Boston Dynamics since 1994.