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Raibert’s big promise is that the Spot will become the “Android of robotics” - a customizable platform that other companies can build on to meet specific needs. Appearing onstage in his trademark Hawaiian shirts, he regularly wows audiences with tech demos, directing Spot to jump, trot, and dance, like a robot ringmaster. Boston Dynamics is already selling robots it acquired with this purchase, giving it a foothold in the new industry.Īs part of this new focus, Raibert has become a familiar figure on the tech conference scene. Notably, the Japanese firm’s other bets in robotics - which include Aldebaran, makers of the Pepper robot, and Fetch Robotics, which does warehouse automation - have been selling robots in commercial settings for years.Īs well as making Spot into a salable robot, the company has also bought logistics startup Kinema Systems to pave the way into warehouse automation. Softbank is an “unabashedly commercial company” and will want to “get a return on their investment,” Nieves says. “That’s one of the ingredients,” he says. Raibert says commercialization was always the end goal, but that access to SoftBank’s significant resources have allowed the company to kick its production of robots into a higher gear. The trigger for commercialization seems to have been the company’s acquisition in 2017 by Japanese tech giant SoftBank. “They had no real mission: just be awesome! But they’re already awesome.”
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“They were on the government dole then on the Google dole,” Erik Nieves, founder of automation company Plus One Robotics, tells The Verge. It’s an assessment with which many in the industry agree. “They were on the government dole then on the Google dole.”
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“And it’s natural … that as we do that R&D it makes robots more and more useful, and it makes it obvious to us that, ‘Oh, this thing could be used and commercialized.’” “We’ve been an R&D company for a long time, working on pushing the envelope making robots that try to live up to people’s idea of what a robot should be,” says Raibert. Its earlier life was shaped by government contracts, and in 2013 it was bought by Google’s parent company, as part of an abortive attempt for the search giant to enter the robotics industry.īoston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert tells The Verge that those years of contracting and research were necessary to bring the company to its current stage of development. Since its founding in 1992, the company has relied on deep-pocketed patrons like the Department of Defense and Alphabet. Credit: DVIDSīoston Dynamics’ robots seem flawless, but that’s partly because they’ve never had to operate in the hurly-burly of commercial environments.
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Boston Dynamics has developed robots for the military like BigDog and LS3 (above), but they were rejected for being too loud.