YouSaid · the spoken record

Marc Raibert

lines on the record

131

first

2024-02-16

most recent

2024-02-16

sittings or episodes

1

sources

podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

1. “I think we're going to find a mating of the two, and we'll have the best of both worlds. And we're working on that at the Institute, too.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The Atlas performances that you've seen are mostly model predictive control. They've started to do some learning stuff that's really incredible. I don't know if it's all been shown yet, but you'll see it over time. And then Marco has done some great stuff and others.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “We have several people working on machine learning approaches. I don't know if you know, but we opened an office in Zurich recently, and Marco Hutter, who's one of the real leaders in reinforcement learning for robots, is the director of that office. He's still half-time at ETH, the university there where he has an unbelievably fantastic lab. And then he's halftime leading, will be leading off efforts in the Zurich office. So we have a healthy learning component, but there's part of me that still says, if you look out in the world at what the most impressive performances are, they're still pretty much, I hate to use the word traditional, but that's what everybody's calling it, traditional controls, like model predictive control.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “You know, since ChatGPT, which is a year ago basically, there's a huge interest in that and a huge optimism about it. And I think that there's a lot of things that machine learning, that kind of machine learning. Now, Chris, there's lots of different kinds of machine learning. I think there's a lot of interest and optimism about it. I think the facts on the ground are that doing physical things with physical robots is a little bit different than language. And the tokens sort of don't exist. Pixel values aren't like words. But I think that there's a lot that can be done there.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I mean, that's what sort of intelligence is, right? Kind of dealing with understanding a situation, even though it wasn't explained.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Think it is. And I think that's the kind of thing that people don't recognize. Let me translate it to navigation. I think the basic paradigm for navigating a space is to get some kind of sensor that tells you where an obstacle is and what's open, build a map, and then go through the space. But if we were doing on-the-job training where I was giving you a task, I wouldn't have to say anything about the room, right? We came in here. All we did is adjust the chair, but we didn't say anything about the room. And, you know, we could navigate it. So I think there's opportunities to build that kind of navigation skill into robots. And we're, you know, we're hoping to be able to do that.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “It is, but there's some parts of it that aren't putting the seat in into the, you have a tube that goes inside of another tube and there's a latch. That should be within range.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Well, it's not obvious if you just look at the raw data what the sequence of acts are. It's really a creative intelligent act for you to break that down into the pieces and understand them in a way so you could say, okay, what skill do I need to accomplish each of those things? So we're working on the front end of that kind of a problem where we observe and translate the, if it may be video, it may be live into a description of what we think is going on and then try and map that into skills to accomplish that. And we've been developing skills as well. So, you know, we have kind of multiple stabs at the pieces of doing that.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Well, with Watch Understand do the project I mentioned before, we've broken that down into getting some progress with what is meaningfully watching something mean, breaking down an observation of a person doing something into the components. Segmenting, you watch me do something. I'm going to pick up this thing and put it down here and stack this on it.”

   2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “A good question. I think we're using the paradigm called stepping stones to moonshots. I don't believe That was in my original proposal for the Institute, Stepping Stones to Moonshots. I think if you go more than a year without seeing a tangible status report of where you are, which is the stepping stone, and it could be a simplification, right? You don't necessarily have to solve all the problems of your target goal, even though your target goal is going to take several years. Those stepping stone results give you feedback, give motivation because usually there's some success in there. And so that's the mantra we've been working on. And that's pretty much how I'd say Boston Dynamics has worked where you make progress and show it as you go. Show it to yourself, if not to the world.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “In the robot. This cost, too, you know, you'd like to get the cost down. Spots are still pretty expensive, and I don't think that they have to be, but it takes a different kind of activity to do that. Now that I think that Boston Dynamics is owned primarily by Hyundai now, and I think that the skills of Hyundai in making cars can be brought to bear in making robots that are less expensive and more reliable and those kinds of things.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I mean, one question you could ask isn't my question, but are they commercially viable? Will they increase productivity? And I think we're getting very close to that. I don't think we're quite there still. Most of the robotics companies, it's a struggle. It's really the lack of the cognitive side that probably is the biggest barrier at the moment, even for the physical least successful robust. But, you know, your question is good. I mean, you can always do a thing that's more efficient, lighter, more reliable. I'd say reliability, you know, I know that Spot, they've been working very hard on getting the tail of the reliability curve up. And they've made huge progress. So the robots, you know, there's 1,500 of them out there now, many of them being used in practical applications day in and day out where they have to work reliably. And it's very exciting that they've done that. But it takes a huge effort to get that kind of reliability.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Without looking, I could fetch these things out of my pocket and figure out which one was which and all that kind of stuff.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “These two things Well, I've touched ones like this. Look at all the things I can do, right? I can juggle them. I'm rotating this way. I can rotate it.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Short supply for robots. Most robots are pretty dumb. And as a result, it takes a lot of skilled people to program them to do everything they do. And it takes a long time. And if robots are going to satisfy our dreams, they need to be smarter. So the AI Institute is designed to combine that physicality of the athletic side with the cognitive side. So for instance, we're trying to make robots that can watch a human do a task, understand what it's seeing, and then do the task itself. So sort of OJT for robot on-job training for robots as a paradigm. Now, you know, that's pretty hard and it's sort of science fiction, but our idea is to work on a longer time frame and work on solving those kinds of problems. And I have a whole list of things that are kind of like in that vein.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I like to talk about intelligence having two parts, an athletic part and a cognitive part. And I think Boston Dynamics, in my view, has sort of set the standard for what athletic intelligence can be. And it has to do with all the things we've been talking about, the mechanical design, the real-time control, the energetics and that kind of stuff. But obviously people have another kind of intelligence, and animals have another kind of intelligence. We can make a plan. Our meeting started at 9.30. I looked up on Google Maps, how long it took to walk over here. It was 20 minutes. So I decided, okay, I'd leave my house at 9, which is what I did. Simple intelligence, but we use that kind of stuff all the time. It's sort of what we think of as going on in our heads. And I think that's interesting.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think that these days most robots aren't doing that. Most robots are Basically, using the computer to govern the motion. Now, the brain, though, is taking into account what the mechanical thing can do and how it's going to behave. Otherwise, it would have to really forcefully move everything around all the time, which probably some solutions do, but I think you end up with a more efficient and more graceful thing if you're taking into account what the machine wants to do.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Sure. There's this idea called passive dynamics, which says that although you can use computers and actuators to make emotion, a mechanical system can make a motion just by itself if it gets stimulated the right way. So Tad McGear in the, I think in the mid-80s, maybe it was in the late 80s, started to work on that. And he made this legged system that could walk down an inclined plane where the legs folded and unfolded and swung forward, do the whole walking motion, where there was no computer. There were some adjustments to the mechanics so that there were dampers and springs in some places that helped the mechanical action happen. It was essentially a mechanical computer. And the idea, the interesting idea there is that it's not all about the brain. Dictating to the body what the body should do. The body is a participant in the motion.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “In big dogs. Yeah, Big Dog came first, and then Little Dog was later. And you know, there's a big compromise there. Human knees have multiple muscles, and you could argue that there's I mean, it's a technical thing about negative work when you're contracting a joint, but you're pushing out that's negative work. And if you don't have a place to store that, it can be very expensive to do negative work. And in Big Dog, there was no place to store negative work in the knees. Big Dog also had pogo stick. Down below. So part of the action was to comply in a bouncing motion. Later on in Spot, we took that out. As we got further and further away from the Leg Lab, we had more energy-driven controls.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Everything in the body is probably helping turn because they're chasing something that's trying to get away that's also zigzagging around. But I would be remiss if I didn't say humans are pretty good too. You watch gymnasts. Especially these days. They're doing just incredible stuff.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Yep, they do a misdirection thing. The front-on views of the cheetahs running fast where the tail is whipping around to help in the turns, to help stabilize in the turns. That's pretty exciting.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Legged locomotion. You know, the slow-mos of cheetahs running are incredible. There's so much back motion and grace. And of course, they're moving very fast. The animals running away from the cheetah are pretty exciting. The pronghorn, which they do this all four legs at once jump called a prong to kind of confuse the, especially if there's a group of them to confuse whoever's chasing them.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Most of it's up in the feathers, but there's a huge amount going on in the feathers, including a knee joint. The knee joints way up there. The thing that's halfway down the leg that looks like a backwards knee is actually the ankle. The thing on the ground, which looks like the foot, is actually the toes. It's an extended But the basic morphology is the same in all these animals.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Oh, yeah, we did, we filmed and digitized data from horses. I did a dissection of ostrich at one point, which has absolutely remarkable legs.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “It's always a balance between wanting to get where you really want to get and what's practical to do based on your resources or what you know and all that. So, I mean, the whole idea of the POGA stick was to do simplification. Obviously, it didn't look like a human. I think a technical scientist could appreciate that we were capturing some of the things that are important in human locomotion without it looking like it without having a knee and ankle. I'll tell you the first sketch that Ben Brown made when we were talking about building this thing was a very complicated thing with zillions of springs, lots of joints. It looked like much more like a kangaroo or an ostrich or something like that. Things we were paying a lot of attention to at the time. So my job was to say, okay.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “For a quadruped, probably. Of course, it was probably the loudest too. So we had this little racing go-kart engine on it, and we would get people from three buildings away sending us complaining about how loud it was.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “And something weird about the knee that you can kind of do this folding and unfolding and get it to work out just a human can get it to work out just right. There's compliances. Compliance main sprintiness in the design that are important to all works. But we used to have a motto at the Boston Dynamics in the early days, which was you have to run before you can walk.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Atlas Dill doesn't walk like a person and it still doesn't walk quite as gracefully as a person, even though it's been getting closer and closer. The running might be close to a human, but the walking is still a challenge.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Unfortunately, though, humans don't really know how they do it. We were coached. We have ways of learning, but do we really understand in a physics way what we're doing? Probably most gymnasts and athletes don't know”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Is the same. You just have to be balancing in the other degrees of freedom. If you're just doing a somersault, it's just a planar thing. Royan Rab was my graduate student and we were at MIT, which is when we made a two-legged robot do a 3D somersault for the first time. There we, in order to get enough rotation rate, you needed to do tucking also, you know, withdraw the legs in order to accelerate it. And he did some really fascinating work on how you stabilize more complicated maneuvers. Remember he was a gymnast at Champion Gymnast before he'd come to me. So he had... He had the physical abilities. Then he was an engineer, so he could translate some of that into the math and the algorithms that you need to do that.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “If you look at the first time we ever made a robot do a somersault, it was in a planar robot. You know, it had a boom. So it was restricted to the surface of a sphere. We call that planar. So it could move fore and aft. It could go up and down and it could rotate. And so the calculation of what you need to do to stick a landing isn't all that complicated. You have to look at time to make the rotation. So how hard you jump gives you time. You look at how quickly you can rotate. And so, you know, if you get those two right, then when you land, do you have the feet in the right place? And you have to get rid of all that rotational and linear momentum. But, you know, that's not too hard to figure out. And we made, you know, back in about 1985 or 6, I can't remember, we had a simple robot doing somersaults. To do it in 3D, really the calculation.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “You have to get the time of launch have momentum and rotation, all those things coordinated so that a landing is within reach.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “It's interesting. I think that the number is only a couple of seconds for Spot, so there's a limited horizon type approach where you're recalculating, assuming what's going to happen in the next second or second and a half. And then you keep iterating at the next, even though a tenth of a second later, you'll say, okay, let's do that again and see what's happening. And you're looking at what the obstacles are, where the feet are going to be placed, how to have to coordinate a lot of things if you have obstacles and you're balancing at the same time. And it's that limited horizon type calculation that's doing a lot of that. But if you're doing something like a somersault, you're looking out a lot further, right? If you want to stick the landing,”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Well, I think having good hardware is part of the story and people who think you don't need to innovate hardware anymore are wrong, in my opinion. So I think one of the things certainly in the early years for me, taking a dynamic approach where you think about what's the evolution of the motion of the thing going to be in the future and having a prediction of that that's used at the time that you're giving signals to it, as opposed to it all being servoing, which is servoing is sort of backward looking. It says, okay, where am I now? I'm going to try and adjust for that. But you really need to think about what's coming.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Are in Atlas, for instance, that had new kinds of circuits. They sort of did some of the computing that could get you much more efficient use. They were much smaller and lighter so that the whole robot could be smaller and lighter. We made a hydraulic power supply that had a bunch of components integrated in this tiny package. It's about this big, the size of a football. It weighs five kilograms and it produces five kilowatts of power. Of course, it has to have a battery operating, but it's got a motor, a pump, filters, heat exchanger to keep it cool, some valves, all of this tiny little package. So hydraulics could still have a ways to go.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “You know, I had been in love with hydraulics and still love hydraulics. Somehow the world out there looks at it like it's old fashioned or that it's icky. And it's true that you do, it is very hard to keep it from having some amount of dripping from time to time. But if you look at the performance, how strong you can get in a lightweight package. And of course, we did a huge amount of innovation. Most of hydraulic control, that is the valve that controls the flow of oil, had been designed in the 50s for airplanes. It had been made robust enough, safe enough that you could count on it so that humans could fly in airplanes. And very little innovation had happened. You know, that might not be fair to the people who make the valves. I'm sure that they did innovate. But the basic design had stayed the same. And there was so much more you could do. And so our engineers designed valves, the ones that”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “He said, yeah, geez, you know, do you think he could make a smaller one that wouldn't be so intimidating, like a big dog? If it was in your house, and I said, yeah, we could do that. And we started and did.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “So Big Dog and LS3 had engine power and hydraulic actuation. Then we made a robot that was Electric power, so there's a battery driving a motor, driving a pump, but still hydraulic actuation Larry sort of asked us, could you make something that weighed 60 pounds that would not be so intimidating if you had it in a house where there were people? And that was the inspiration behind the spot, pretty much as it exists today. We did a prototype the same size that was the first all-electric non-hydraulic robot.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “We had one carrying the other one. We had two of them. So we had one carrying the other one. There's a little clip of that. We should put that out somewhere. That's from 20 years ago.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “And we had advanced the controls and everything so much that an amateur, complete amateur could operate the robot the first time up and down and up and down, whereas it taken us years to get there in the previous robot.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “As challenging as the woods were. Working inside of a home or in an office is really harder. Because when you're in the woods, you can actually take any path up the hill. All you have to do is avoid the obstacles. There's no such thing as damaging the woods, at least, you know, to first order. Whereas if you're in a house, you can't leave scuff marks. You can't bang into the walls. The robots aren't very comfortable bumping into the walls, especially in the early days. So I think those were actually bigger challenges once we faced them. It was mostly getting the systems to work well enough together. the hardware systems to work. And the controls in those days, we did have a human operator who did all the visual perception going up the Guadalcanal Trail. So there was an operator who was right there who was very skilled at, even though the robot was balancing itself and placing its own feet. If the operator didn't do the right thing, it wouldn't go. But years later, we went back with one of the precursor to spot.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “We did. We spent a lot of time down at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, where there was a trail called the Guadalcanal Trail. And our milestone that DARPA had specified was that we could go on this one particular trail that involved, you know, a lot of challenge. And we spent a lot of time, our team spent a lot of time down there. Those were fun days”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Well, it was the first thing that worked. So let's see if we go back to the leg lab. We'd built a quadruped. Could do many of the things that Big Dog did, but it had a hydraulic pump sitting in the room with hoses connected to the robot. It had a VAX computer in the next room. It needed its own room because it was this giant thing with air conditioning. And it had this very complicated bus connected to the robot. And the robot itself just had the actuators. It had gyroscopes for sensing and some other sensors. But all the power and computing was off board. BigDog had all that stuff integrated on the platform. It had a gasoline engine for power, which was a very complicated thing to undertake. It had to convert the rotation of the engine into hydraulic power, which is how we actuated it. So there was a lot of learning just on the building the physical robot and the system integration for that. And then there was the controls of it.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “I mean, you got to say that Big Dog was sort of put us on the map and got our heads really pulled together. We scaled up the company. Big Dog was the result of Alan Rudolph at DARPA starting a biodynotics program. And he put out a request for proposals. And I think there were 42 proposals written and three got funded. One was Big Dog. One was a climbing robot rise. And, you know, that put things in motion. We hired Martin Bueller. He was a professor in Montreal at McGill. He was incredibly important for getting Big Dog out of the lab and into the mud, which is a key step to really be willing to go out there and build it, break it, fix it, which is sort of one of our mottos at the company.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Funny, one of my things was to show stuff in video, even from the very early days of the hopping machines. And so I was always focused on how this is going to look through the viewfinder. And running IBO didn't look so cool through the viewfinder.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Mostly we learn that something that small Doesn't look very exciting when it's running. It's like it's scampering, and you had to watch a slow-mo. For it to look like it was interesting. If you watch it fast, it was just like”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Well, there was the IBO runner, but it wasn't even a whole robot. It was just legs that we took off the legs on IBOs and attached legs we'd made. And, you know, we got that working and showed it to the Sony people. We worked pretty closely with Sony in those years. One of the interesting things is that it was before the internet and Zoom and anything like that. So we had six ISDN lines installed. And we would have a telecon every week that worked at very low frame rates, something like 10 Hz, you know, English across the boundary with Japan was a challenge, trying to understand what each of us was saying and have meetings every week for several years doing that. And it was a pleasure working with them. They were really supporters. They seemed to like us and what we were doing.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “And we looked at it and thought, well, maybe we could sell it to hospitals that would teach and train their surgeons. And then we said, well, we're this, at the time, we were probably a 12-person company or maybe 15 people, I don't remember, there's no way we could go after a marketing activity. You know, the company was all bootstrapped in those years. We never had investors until Google bought us, which was after 20 years. So we didn't have any resources to go after hospitals. At one day, Rob and I were looking at that and we said we'd built another simulator for knee orthoscopy. And we said, this isn't going to work. And we killed it and we moved on. And that was really a milestone in the company because we, you know, we sort of understood who we were and what would work and what wouldn't. Even though technically it was really a fascinating thing.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “We figured out shortly after that we thought surgeons were going to pay us to get trained on these things. And the surgeons thought we should pay them in order to, so they could teach us about the thing. And there was no money from the surgeons”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “And we were doing surgical operations, anastomosis, which was stitching tubes together, you know, tubes like blood vessels or other things in their body. And you could feel and you could see the tissues move. And it was really exciting. And the idea was to make a trainer to teach surgeons how to do stuff. We built a scoring system because we'd interviewed surgeons that told us what you're supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do. You're not supposed to tear the tissue. You're not supposed to touch it in any place except for where you're trying to engage. There were a bunch of rules. So we built this thing and took it to a trade show, a surgical trade show. And the surgeons were practically lined up. Well, we kept the score and we posted their scores like on a video game. And those guys are so competitive that they really, really love doing it. And they would come around and they see someone's score was higher there. So they would come back.”

    2024-02-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #412 – Marc Raibert: Boston Dynamics and the Future of Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source