Our doom is closer with the creation of the robot sled team!
That’s just unreal. What does that thing weigh?
Approximately 100 crushed human skulls.
That is truly incredible. Honda had been working on ambulatory robots for decades, but Boston Dynamics had left left them in the dust.
Seems like it might make more sense to drop a bunch of modified doggy robots onto Mars instead of a big lander. Get a bunch of them out marching around taking pics and samples.
I guess the lander has a built-in lab, though.
It makes a lot more sense. I wonder how much more energy spot requires per mile vs. the landers? I’m guessing a lot more since it can only run for 90 minutes on a plugged in charge vs. the current martian landers; which only collect their measly charge via dusty solar cells.
I wonder how much a Spot costs
See spot.
See spot run.
See spot cost as much as a car.
“Our general guidance is that the total cost of the early adopter program lease will be less than the price of a car—but how nice a car will depend on the number of Spots leased and how long the customer will be leasing the robot.”
But can it fetch you a beer?
Yeah, I don’t think these Boston Dynamics demos are at present useful for anything but acquiring investors (and judging from past performance, not very good at that either). They are hugely impressive, to be sure, in their kinematics, and in their promise for the future, but at the moment they have no applications. Their endurance is too low, and I also doubt they can run autonomously for any useful purpose. Who knows how long they had to tweak that parkour thing to work on a perfectly flat floor before they were able to stitch those takes together for the video.
Best application I can think of is security, since it looks like these robots could patrol across a variety of terrain, navigate doors, etc. And it’s water-resistant. It would do a better job than this thing:
It was pretty striking that the launch ad a) didn’t seem to articulate a commercial application, and b) was clearly pitched at techies, what with its pseudocode. They seemed to be hinting at construction as a possible application, but I would have thought it would be an extremely expensive way to carry small loads short distances slowly, compared to, say, a person.
Those videos are pretty much “tech demos” that you see in many places - showing cool capabilities, but not really applying it to a practical use.
I’d be interested in how long that small, nimble robot can operate before it runs out of power.
They claim 90 minutes, though no idea under what conditions
Only 30 minutes if being constantly judged.
You’d have to buy a fleet of them to get anything done. Assuming it takes 90 minutes to charge (probably much more), you need two to do the work of one. You need 4 to do the work of 2, etc. You’d have to have a rotation schedule for them, space to charge on the job site, etc. Plus what if it breaks or malfunctions? You can’t go down to Home Depot and get a part or replacement. You have to wait on some BD tech to come troubleshoot, or wait for a replacement.
Yeah, humans are expensive. But not fleet of robots expensive.
I can carry two cinderblocks, one in each hand, and I only need a sammich for fuel.
Not sure that’s true, you just need extra batteries. The launch video shows them replacing the battery so you just need one battery always full for each spot.