For sale: one robot in search of a job
But still, it is not entirely clear what someone would do with one of these
WALTHAM, MASS. — Moving like a large dog, knees bent and hips swaying, the robot walked across a parking lot and into a rain puddle.
There, it danced a jig, splashing water across the asphalt. Then it turned and trotted toward a brick building, climbing over a curb and stopping within inches of a floor-length window. Pausing for several seconds, it seemed to eye its own reflection in the glass.
The scene was mesmerizing — so mesmerizing, it was easy to forget that a woman was guiding the four-legged machine from across the parking lot, a joystick in her hands and a laptop computer strapped to her waist.
The robot was called SpotMini. It was designed by Boston Dynamics, a company widely known for building machines that move like animals and humans.
Thanks to a steady stream of YouTube videos from the otherwise secretive robotics lab, its machines have become an internet phenomenon.
But YouTube fame has not translated to very much revenue. In the coming year, Boston Dynamics, which was founded in 1992, plans to start selling the SpotMini, its first commercial robot.
The mechanical dog would be a turning point for an outfit that has bewildered people with both its wondrous technology and its seeming lack of interest in making things someone — anyone — would actually want to buy.
Even now, it is not entirely clear what someone would do with one of these robots. That makes it hard to get past a question people have been asking about Boston Dynamics for years: Is this a business or a research lab?
“We think the technology has reached a point where it can be deployed productively,” Marc Raibert, the company’s founder, said during a recent interview inside his robotics lab, about 16 kilometres from Boston.
“But we don’t know what the big application is.”
As the rest of the tech industry has focused on robotic cars and other contraptions that can navigate roads and warehouse floors, Boston Dynamics, which is owned by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, has plugged away at machines that can walk through the woods, into a rock quarry, across your home.
“These robots can climb stairs,” said Sangbae Kim, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on similar machines. “They can jump on a table.”
But if driverless cars are still years away from everyday use, walking robots are even further.
Though these machines are shockingly lifelike, they have limits. They can handle some tasks on their own, like spotting a curb and climbing over it. But when moving across unfamiliar spaces, like the parking lot outside the Boston Dynamics lab, they still need a human guide. In person, they stumble and fall more often than they do on YouTube.
In 2013, Google acquired Boston Dynamics during a broad push toward driverless cars and other robotics.
When Google acquired Boston Dynamics, it ended the company’s military contracts. Now that the company is owned by SoftBank, Raibert said, it could also return to military work.
Boston Dynamics does seem to have an owner willing to wait until the business gets figured out. And with a $100-billion investment fund, a partnership with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, SoftBank is betting on technologies that require years of work.
Before buying Boston Dynamics, it acquired a French robotics company, Aldebaran, which also is working on machines that are a long way from completion.
Robots are a focus of Japanese tech researchers. SoftBank is already offering a machine, called Pepper, that automates parts of customer service at retail stores. Schaft, which is owned by Google despite reports of a sale to SoftBank, is exploring machines similar to those at Boston Dynamics. And the Toyota Research Institute is working toward robots that can serve Japan’s rapidly growing population of retirees.
At Boston Dynamics, Raibert wants to sell robots to businesses, governments and all sorts of other customers. He calls himself “a lifer” in his quest to build machines that can do everything animals and humans can do.
And if that means finding a way to make money from his experiments along the way, so be it.