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Robots from Boston Dynamics and more

Saul Goodman said:
It's no secret that they've been funded by DARPA for about a decade, and that the robots are being made for the American military.
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Actually they've made stuff for DARPA but they're absolutely not wholly funded or owned by them.
Boston Dynamics was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group. It was announced on December 11th, 2020 that Hyundai Motor Company took an 80% stake in the company for $880M. SoftBank will retain a 20% stake in the company. This change of ownership puts Boston Dynamics total valuation at $1.1B.
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Boston Dynamics - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
weltweit said:
Oh OK, I wasn't aware of that.
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Google used to own Boston Dynamics, but they sold it a few years ago and focused their efforts on making a browser that censored content and reported user searches back to the Chinese government, to facilitate people going missing in the dead of night.
No surprise that Google's famous "Dont be evil" motto has been removed from its code of conduct.
 
editor said:
Actually they've made stuff for DARPA but they're absolutely not wholly funded or owned by them.

Boston Dynamics - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...

Boston Dynamics are however one of those companies that would never survive in a real market, as oppose to the oligopsony that they actually operate in. Kind of like how companies like United Launch Alliance (as well as the dozens of sub-contractors beneath them) couldn't exist without NASA.
 
NoXion said:
Boston Dynamics are however one of those companies that would never survive in a real market, as oppose to the oligopsony that they actually operate in. Kind of like how companies like United Launch Alliance (as well as the dozens of sub-contractors beneath them) couldn't exist without NASA.
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I am told that when Softbank bought them, they said "What would it take to turn the 4-legged robot into a platform that everyone used?" and the answer was "we'd build and destroy a few hundred of them, and then we could manufacture them for a reasonable amount each, but that would cost <ridiculous sum> and Masa Son said "great, here's <ridiculous sum> get on with it."

Hence Spot, which is getting traction in things like oil rig inspection...
 
rich! said:
I am told that when Softbank bought them, they said "What would it take to turn the 4-legged robot into a platform that everyone used?" and the answer was "we'd build and destroy a few hundred of them, and then we could manufacture them for a reasonable amount each, but that would cost <ridiculous sum> and Masa Son said "great, here's <ridiculous sum> get on with it."

Hence Spot, which is getting traction in things like oil rig inspection...
Click to expand...

Form what I understand though, Spot isn't something that anyone can actually just buy like any typical product. Instead you can only lease a Spot, and I'm pretty sure that quite apart from costing a bomb, that Boston Dynamics are very picky about who they choose.
 
NoXion said:
Form what I understand though, Spot isn't something that anyone can actually just buy like any typical product. Instead you can only lease a Spot, and I'm pretty sure that quite apart from costing a bomb, that Boston Dynamics are very picky about who they choose.
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Leasing of course means that a whole bunch of "product quality" legal rights aren't there - and also makes it a lot easier to recall the product if you discover problems with it. The pricing I'd heard was "a lot cheaper than Anymal" :)
 
ferrelhadley said:
Lol, the "military" might buy 1000 robots. The market for something that does the dishes and hoovers for £1k might be in the order of about 1 billion households and several hundred million businesses would find applications.
That said these kind of machines do not yet show much in the way of endurance and independence.
It is far more likely they will be doing warehouse work for Walmart, Amazon and Tesco before they are anywhere near a battle field.
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Seems some people want to have "hot takes" on this technology without bothering to think about its limitations or applications, so they just shout "military so bad". In its current form the technology does not appear to have much military application. Its going to be hugely vulnerable to small arms fire, likely has little endurance and will likely need to be in contact with big processing power to do all the maths that your earlobe does for you. Something like searching houses or looking for bombs in cars would be a possibility, but then again there is far more application for that in law enforcement and things like fire services (searching houses after a fire, clearing dangerous buildings etc).
The risk this suit of technologies will likely pose is to semi skilled labour. Factories and warehouses are easy to control environments so can be set up for these kind of machines. But in that its like almost all technology, they offer opportunities and risks, its the social and political structure of the society that surrounds them that determines their impact on jobs.

But this must be years to decades away from general applications. Its still all prototyping by the look of it. Its a solution looking for a problem. Then again, home computing was called that back in the late 70s.
 
ferrelhadley said:
Seems some people want to have "hot takes" on this technology without bothering to think about its limitations or applications, so they just shout "military so bad". In its current form the technology does not appear to have much military application. Its going to be hugely vulnerable to small arms fire, likely has little endurance and will likely need to be in contact with big processing power to do all the maths that your earlobe does for you. Something like searching houses or looking for bombs in cars would be a possibility, but then again there is far more application for that in law enforcement and things like fire services (searching houses after a fire, clearing dangerous buildings etc).
The risk this suit of technologies will likely pose is to semi skilled labour. Factories and warehouses are easy to control environments so can be set up for these kind of machines. But in that its like almost all technology, they offer opportunities and risks, its the social and political structure of the society that surrounds them that determines their impact on jobs.

But this must be years to decades away from general applications. Its still all prototyping by the look of it. Its a solution looking for a problem. Then again, home computing was called that back in the late 70s.
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Be bloody great if they send some out to explore Mars though.
 
Their Big Dog robot was at one point being considered to carry ammunition for the infantry.

I believe in that incarnation it had an engine which was too loud.
 
More appropriate music in that video. The other one was cuteh until you clock that the dancers are all plexiglass walled away from the humans in case they kill them all. Accidentally of course. :hmm:
 
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