YouSaid · the spoken record
Robert Playter
- lines on the record
- 161
- first
- 2023-04-28
- most recent
- 2023-04-28
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- 1
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- 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
“It's omnidirectional. It can move in any direction. So it has a nice suspension built into it so it can deal with gaps or things on the floor and roll over it. But it's not a balancing robot. It's a mobile robot arm that can work to carry or pick or place a box up to 50 pounds anywhere in the warehouse.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, we made a hard decision, and this was really kind of a hard nosed business decision. It indicated us. Not doing it just for the beauty of the mathematics or the curiosity, but no, we actually need to build a business that can make money in the long run. And so we ended up building Stretch, which has a big heavy base with a giant battery in the base of it that allows it to run for two shifts, 16 hours worth of operation. And that big battery sort of helps it stay balanced, right? So you can move a 50-pound box around with its arm and not tip over.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we had figured out the mathematics of doing this momentum control, how to maintain that balance. And so part of the reason why we built this two-legged robot was we had figured this thing out. We wanted to see it in this kind of machine. And we thought maybe this kind of machine would be good in a warehouse. And so we built it. And it's a beautiful machine. It moves in a graceful way like nothing else we've built. But it wasn't the right machine for a logistics application. We decided it was too slow and couldn't pick boxes fast enough, basically. And”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so our first concept of handle, which was a robot that was going to be on two wheels, so it had the balance, but it was going to have a big long arm so it could reach a box at the top of a truck. And it was going to, it needed yet another counterbalance, a big tail, to help it balance while it was using its arm. So the reason why this robot sort of looks epic. Some people said it looked like an ostrich or maybe an ostrich moving around. Was the wheels, the lead, it has legs so it can extend its legs, so it's wheels on legs. We always wanted to build wheels on legs. It had a tail and it had this arm. And they're all moving simultaneously and in coordination to maintain balance.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I'd love talking about the history of how a handle came about. Because it connects all of our robots, actually, so I'm going to start with Atlas. When we had Atlas getting fairly far along, we wanted to understand, I was telling you earlier, the challenge of the human form is that you have this mass up high. And balancing that inertia, that mass up high is its own unique challenge. And so we started trying to get Atlas to balance standing on one foot, like on a balance beam, using its arms like this. And you can do this, I'm sure. I can do this, right? Like if you walk in a tightrope, how do you do that balance? So that's sort of controlling the inertia, controlling the momentum of the robot. We were starting to figure that out on Atlas.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because it wasn't going to have this balance problem. And in fact, the very first version of the logistics robot we built was a balancing robot. And that's called Handle. And there's”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a legged robot. So it was our first Was actually a bit of a commitment from us, a challenge for us to build a non-balancing robot.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It looks like a big strong robot arm on a mobile base. The base is about the size of a pallet, and we want it to be the size of a pallet because that's what lives in warehouses, right? Pallets of goods sitting everywhere. So it needed to be able to fit in that space.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This year. So, our first deliveries of stretch to customers were DHL and Maersk in January. We're delivering the gap right now. And we have about seven or eight other customers, all who've already agreed in advance to buy between 10 and 20 robots. And so we've already got commitments for a couple hundred of these robots. This one's going to go, right? It's so obvious that there's a need. And we're not just going to unload trucks. We're going to do any box moving task in the warehouse. And so it too will be a multi-purpose robot. And we'll eventually have it doing palletizing or depalletizing or loading trucks or unloading trucks. There's definitely thousands of robots. There's probably tens of thousands of robots of this in the future. So it's going to be profitable”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some estimates we think there's a trillion boxes cardboard boxes shipped around the world each year, and a lot of it's done manually. It became clear early on that there was an opportunity for a mobile robot in here to move boxes around. And the commercial experience has been very different between stretch and with spot. As soon as we started talking to people, potential customers, about what Stretch was going to be used for, they immediately started saying, oh, I'll buy that Roma. In fact, I'm going to put in an order for 20 right now. We just started shipping the robot in January after several years of development.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started differently than Spot. You know, Spot, we built because we had decades of experience building quadrupeds. We had it in our blood. We had to build a quadruped product. But we had to go figure out what the application was. And we actually discovered this factory patrol application. Basically, preventative maintenance by seeing what our customers did with it. Stretch is very different. We started knowing that there was warehouses all over the world, there's shipping containers moving all around the world full of boxes that are mostly being moved by hand.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that sort of part of the business. So it still needs to grow, but we're on a good path. So I think that's totally achievable.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a real return on investment there. But there needs to be a critical mass of this task. And we're focusing on a few that we believe are ubiquitous in the industrial production environment. And that's using a thermal camera to keep things from overheating, using an acoustic imager to find compressed air leaks, using visual cameras to read gauges, measuring vibration. These are standard things that you do to prevent unintended shutdown of a factory. And this takes place in a beer factory. We're working with AB InBev. It takes place in chip fabs. We're working with global foundries. It takes place in electric utilities and nuclear power plants. And so the same robot can be applied in all of these industries. And as I said, we have about, actually, it's 1,100 spots out now to really get profitability.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a challenge because A, you need to field the robots, they need to start to become reliable. And as we've said, that takes time and investment to get there. And so it really does take visionary investment to get there. But we believe that we are going to make money in this industrial monitoring space because If a chip fab, if the line goes down because of vacuum pump failed someplace, that can be at a very expensive process. It can be a million dollars a day in lost production. Maybe you have to throw away some of the product along the way. And so the robot, if you can prevent that by inspecting the factory every single day, maybe every hour if you have to.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the early days, of course, the money we made was from doing contract RD work, and we made money. We weren't growing and we weren't selling a product. And then we went through several owners who had a vision of not only developing advanced technology, but eventually developing products. And so both Google and SoftBank and now Hyundai had that vision and were willing to provide that investment. Now, our discipline is that we need to go find applications that are broad enough that you could imagine selling thousands of robots because it doesn't work if you don't sell thousands or tens of thousands of robots. If you only sell hundreds, you will commercially fail. And that's where most of the small robot companies have died.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We take that kind of direction from them. And if they're, especially if they're going to buy 10 or 20 or 30 robots and they say, I really needed to do this, well, that's exactly the right kind of problem that we want to be working on.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We love working with customers who have challenging problems like this. And this one in particular because we felt like what they were doing, A, it was a safety feature. B, we saw that the robot could do it because they teleoperated it the first time. Probably took them an hour to do it the first time, right? But the robot was clearly capable. And we thought, oh, this is a great problem for us to work on to figure out how to automate a manipulation task. And so we took it on not because we were going to make a bunch of money from it in selling the robot back to them, but because it motivated us to go solve what we saw as the next logical step. But many of our customers, in fact, we try to, our bigger customers, typically ones who are going to run a utility or a factory or something like that.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It maintains its balance. It walks itself into position. So it's within reach and the arm is in a position where it can do the whole task. So it manages the whole body.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an interactive way. And they showed it to us. And we were so excited about it and said, you know, I bet we can automate that task. And so we got some examples of that breaker switch. And I believe in the next generation of the software, now we're going to deliver back to Ontario power generation. They're going to be able to just point the robot at that breaker. They'll indicate that's the switch. There's sort of two actions you have to do. You have to flip up this little cover, press a button, then get a ratchet, stick it into a socket, and literally unscrew this giant breaker switch. So there's a bunch of different tasks. And we basically automated them so that the human says, okay, there's the switch. Go do that part. where you're going to put your tool and you're going to open it up and so you can remotely sort of indicate this on the tablet and then the robot just does”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we want a task like opening doors, you can automate most of that. And we've automated a few other tasks. We had a customer who had a high-powered breaker switch, essentially. It's an electric utility Ontario power generation. And they have to when they're going to disconnect their power supply, that could be a gas generator, could be a nuclear power plant from the grid, you have to disconnect this breaker switch. Whereas you can imagine there's hundreds or thousands of amps and volts involved in this breaker switch. And it's a dangerous event because occasionally you'll get what's called an arc flash as you just do this disconnect, the power, the sparks jump across and people die doing this. And so Ontario power generation used our spot and the arm through the interface to operate this disconnect.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want both. In the next version of the software that we release, which will be version 3.3, we're going to offer the ability, if you have an autonomous mission for the robot, we're going to include the option that it can go through a door, which means it's going to have to have an arm and it's going to And so that'll be an autonomous manipulation task that just you can program easily with the robot. Strictly through, we have a tablet interface. And so on the tablet, you know, you sort of see the view that Spot sees. You say, there's the door handle. The hinges are on the left and it opens in. The rest is up to you. Take care of it.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the robot will control the motion of its hand to go pick it up autonomously. So in the same way the robot walks and balances managing its own foot placement to stay balanced. We want manipulation to be mostly autonomous where the robot, you indicate, okay, go grab that bottle and then the robot will just go do it using the camera in its hand and then sort of closing in on the grasp. It's a whole nother complex robot on top of a complex legged robot. And so, and of course, we made the hand look a little like ahead because, again, we want it to be sort of identifiable. In the last year, a lot of our sales have been people who already have a robot now buying an arm to add to that robot.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think the future of mobile robots is mobile manipulation. That's where In the past 10 years, it was getting mobility to work, getting the legged locomotion to work. If you ask, what's the hard problem in the next 10 years? It's getting a mobile robot to do useful manipulation for you. And so we wanted Spot to have an arm to experiment with those problems. And the arm is almost as complex as the robot itself, you know, and it's an attachable payload. It has several motors and actuators and sensors. It has a camera in the end of its hand. So you can sort of see something.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the difference between the general purpose machine or the platform versus the purpose built machine. And so even though even in the factory, we'd still like the robot to do lots of different tasks. If we really knew on day one that we're going to be operating in a factory with these three sensors in it, we would have it all integrated in a package that would be easier, more less expensive, and more reliable. So we're contemplating building a next generation of that machine.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more. And, you know, these are really just the first generation of these machines. We're already thinking about what the next generation of spots are going to look like Spot was built as a platform, so you could put almost any sensor on it We provided data communications, mechanical connections, power connections. But, for example, in the applications that we're excited about where you're monitoring these factories for their health, There's probably a simpler machine that we could build that's really focused on that use case.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting everybody on the same page here that we still need to move fast, but we also need to try to figure out how to reduce cost. That's one of the challenges of this migration we're going through.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's hard because, to be honest, we're still iterating on the design of the robot as we find failures from these reliability tests. We need to go engineer changes. And those changes need to now be propagated to the manufacturing line. And that's a hard process, especially when you want to move as fast as we do. And that's been challenging. And it makes it, you know, the folks who are working supply chain, who are trying to get the cheapest parts for us kind of requires that you buy a lot of them to make them cheap. And then we go change the design from underneath them. They're like, what are you doing? And so, you know.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're still learning a lot there. We're learning how to cast parts instead of mill it all out of billet aluminum. We're learning how to get plastic molded parts. And we're learning about how to control that process so that you can build the same robot twice in a row. There's a lot to learn there, and we're only part way through that process. We've set up a manufacturing facility in Waltham. It's about a mile from our headquarters and we're doing final assembly and test of both spots and stretches at that factory.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to stop way short of the sentience. It is the case that if you come to our office today and walk around the hallways, You're going to see a dozen robots just kind of walking around. The time. And that's really a reliability test for us. So we have these robots programmed to do autonomous missions, get up off their charging dock, walk around the building, collect data at a few different places, and go sit back down. And we want that to be a very reliable process because that's what somebody who's running a brewery, a factory, that's what they need the robot to do. And so we have to dog food our own robot. We have to test it in that way. And so on a weekly basis, we have robots that are accruing something like 1,500 or maybe 2,000 kilometers of walking and over 1,000 hours of operation every week. And that's something that almost, I don't think anybody else in the world can do because, hey, you have to have a fleet of robots to just accrue that much information. You have to be willing to dedicate.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get reliability to where it needs to be, we have to have fleets of robots that we're just operating 24-7 in our offices to go find those rare failures and eliminate them. It's just a totally different kind of activity than the research activity where you get it to work. You know, the one robot you have to work in a repeatable way at the high stakes demo. It's just very different. But I think we're making remarkable progress against it.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have good people. We have engineers who want to solve problems. And the quality and cost and manufacturability is just another kind of problem. And because they're so invested in what we're doing, they're interested in and will go work on those problems as well. And so I think we're managing that transition very well. In fact, I'm really pleased that I mean, it's a huge undertaking, by the way, right? So even having.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm glad you brought that last part up. The transition from an RD company to a commercial company, that's the thing you worry about, you know, because you've got these engineers who love hard problems, who want to figure out how to make robots work. And you don't know if you have engineers that want to work on the quality and reliability and cost that is ultimately required. And indeed, we have brought on a lot of new people who are inspired by those problems. But the big takeaway lesson for me is”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there was a little bit of a philosophical difference there. And so ultimately, that's why we're building robots for the industrial sector now, because the industry can afford a more expensive machine because their productivity depends on keeping their factory going. And so if spot costs $100,000 or more, that's not such a big expense to them. Whereas at the consumer level, no one's going to buy a robot like that. And I think we might eventually get to a consumer level product that will be that cheap, but I think the path to getting there needs to go through these really nice machines so that we can then learn how to simplify.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A short amount of time He suggested that we make the robots really inexpensive. And part of our philosophy has always been. The best hardware you can make the machine operate well so that you're trying to solve Discover that the hard problem that you don't know about. Don't make it harder by building a crappy machine, basically. Build the best machine you can. There's plenty of hard problems to solve that are going to have to do with underactuated systems and balance. And so we wanted to build these high quality machines still. And we thought that was important for us to continue learning about really what was the important parts of the Make Robots work.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larry always liked the toothbrush test. He wanted products that you used every day. What they really wanted was A consumer level product, something that would work in your house. We didn't think that was the right next thing to do. Because to be a consumer level product, cost is going to be very important. Probably need to cost a few thousand dollars. And we were building these machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million dollars to build. Of course, we were only building two, but... We didn't see how to get all the way to this consumer level product.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wanted to continue developing was a quadruped, but we knew it needed to be smaller. We knew it couldn't have a gas engine. We thought it probably couldn't be hydraulically actuated. So that began the process of exploring if we could migrate to a smaller electrically actuated robot. And that was really the genesis of Spot.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around 2012 or so, so again, almost 10 years into sort of a run with DARPA where we built a bunch of different quadrupeds. We had a sort of a different thread where we started building humanoids. We saw that probably an end was coming where the government was going to kind of back off from a lot of robotics investment. In order to maintain progress, we just deduced that, well, we probably need to sell ourselves to somebody who wants to continue to invest in this area. And that was Google. And so at Google, we would meet regularly with Larry Page. And Larry just started asking us, you know, what's your product going to be? And the logical thing, the thing that we had the most history with.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and to discover those principles, you know, you asked earlier about the art and science of a legged locomotion, we were able to develop principles of legged locomotion so that we knew how to build a small legged robot or a big one. So leg length was now a parameter that we could play with. Payload was a parameter we could play with. So we built the LS3, which was an 800-pound robot designed to carry a 400-pound payload. And we learned the design rules, basically developed the design rules. How do you scale different robot systems to their terrain, to their walking speed, to their payload?”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of what became a whole series of robots. So once we showed to DARPA that you could make a legged robot that could work, there was a period at DARPA where robotics got really hot and there was lots of different programs. And we were able to build other robots. We built other quadrupeds to hand like LS3 designed to carry heavy loads. We built cheetah, which was designed to explore what are the limits to how fast you can run. We began to build sort of a portfolio of machines and software that led us build not just one robot, but a whole family of robots.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the early versions stood about, I don't know, belly high, chest high. They probably weighed maybe a couple of hundred pounds. But over the course of probably five years. We are able to get that robot to really manage a remarkable level of rough terrain. So we started out with just walking on the flat and then we started walking on rocks and then inclines and then mud and then slippery mud. And by the end of that program, we were convinced that legged locomotion in a robot could actually work because going into it, we didn't know that. We had built quadrupeds at MIT. But they were, they used a giant hydraulic pump in the lab. They used a giant computer that was in the lab. They were always tethered to the lab. This was the first time something that was sort of self-contained, you know, walked around in the world and balanced. And the purpose was to prove to ourselves that the legged locomotion could really work. And so Big Dog really cut that open for us. And it was the beginning.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It absolutely was, right? We weren't trying to design the best robot hardware at the time. And we wanted to buy an off-the-shelf engine. And so many of the early versions of Big Dog had literally go-kart engines or something like that. Like a yeah, gas powered two-stroke engine, and the reason why it was two stroke is because two stroke engines are lighter weight, but they're also, and we generally didn't put mufflers on them because we're trying to save the weight. We didn't care about the noise. And so these things were horribly loud, but we're trying to manage weight because managing weight in a legged robot is always important because it has to carry everything.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We built a few different versions of them, but the first one, the very earliest ones, didn't work very well. We would take them out. And it was hard to get a go-kart engine driving a hydraulic. Oh, is that what it was? And having that all work while trying to get the robot to stabilize itself.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A robot dog. And we won a contract to build that. And so that was the genesis of big dog. And it was a quadruped. And it was the first time we built a robot that had everything on board that you could actually take the robot out into the wild and operate it. So it had onboard power plant. It had onboard computers. It had hydraulic actuators that needed to be cooled. So we had cooling systems built in. Everything integrated into the robot. And that was a pretty rough start, right? It was 10 years that we were not a robotics company. We were a simulation company. And then we had to build a robot in about a year. So that was a little bit of a rough transition.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the company started in 1992 And in probably 2003, I believe is when we took a contract from DARP, so basically 10 years, 11 years, we weren't doing robotics. We did a little bit of robotics with Sony. They had their IBO robot. We were developing some software for that that kind of got us a little bit involved with robotics again. Then there's this opportunity to do a DARPA contract where they wanted to build.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need for people who are operating those robots to understand what the robots are doing. If the robot gets into, needs help or is in trouble or something, it needs to be able to communicate. And a physical indication of some sort so that a person looks at the robot and goes, oh, I know what that robot's doing. The robot's going to go take measurements of my vacuum pump with its thermal camera. You know, you want to be able to indicate that and where even just the robot's about to turn in front of you and maybe indicate that it's going to turn. And so you sort of see and can anticipate its motion. So this kind of communication is going to become more and more important. It wasn't sort of our starting point. But now the robots are really out in the world and, you know, we have about a thousand of them out with customers. Right now”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's going to be really important. And it's a thing we're beginning to pay attention to. We really want to start a differentiator for the company has always been we really want the robot to work. We want it to be useful. Making it work at first meant the legged locomotion really works. It can really get around and it doesn't fall down. But beyond that, now it needs to be a useful tool and our customers are For example, factory owners, people who are running a process manufacturing facility, and the robot needs to be able to get through this complex facility in a reliable way, you know, taking measurements.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just kind of fun, you know, to look at the robot. We started off the video with Atlas kind of looking around for where the bag of tools was because the guy up on the scaffolding says, send me some tools. And Atlas has to kind of look around and see where they are. And there's a little personality there that is fun. It's entertaining. It makes our jobs interesting. And I think in the long run can enhance interaction between humans and robots in a way that isn't available to machines that don't move that way.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feelings for a machine, and you know, people have feelings for their cars. You know, they get attracted to them, attached to them. So that's inherently could be a good thing as long as we manage what that interaction is. So we don't put strong boundaries around this and ultimately think it's a benefit, but it also can be a bit of a curse because I think people look at these machines and they attribute a level of intelligence that the machines don't have. Why? Because again, they've seen things move like this that we're living beings. Which are intelligent. And so they want to attribute intelligence to the robots that isn't appropriate yet, even though they move like an intelligent being.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll say to address the meta question, we don't try to draw hard lines around it being an it or a hymn or a her. It's okay, right? I think part of the magic of these kinds of machines is by nature of their organic movement of their dynamics, we tend to want to identify with them. We tend to look at them and sort of attribute maybe feeling to that because we've only seen things that move like this that were alive. And so this is an opportunity. It means that you could have”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it moves where your point of support is. And so it's really that became kind of the essence of the test. And so that was the beginning of us starting to build rock piles in our parking lots. And we would actually build boxes full of rocks and bring them into the lab. And then we would have the robots walking across these boxes of rocks because that became the essential test.”
2023-04-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #374 – Robert Playter: Boston Dynamics CEO on Humanoid and Legged Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source