Boston Dynamics’ latest robo-creature may be cuter than its creepy robot dogs, but its potential application could nevertheless make warehouse workers wary.
The Handle robot, demonstrated in a YouTube video posted on March 28, is a long-necked robot that looks a lot like a two-wheeled mechanical ostrich. The robot’s “head” features an arrangement of suction cups that can pick up boxes from a pallet, and then release them to make a neat stack.
Cue the “Black Mirror” theme music: Boston Dynamics says it’s putting its scary SpotMini robotic dog on sale next year.
The company’s founder, Marc Raibert, made the announcement on May 11 at a TechCrunch robotics event at the University of California at Berkeley.
“SpotMini is in pre-production now. We’ve built 10 units that’s a design that’s close to a manufacturable design. We built them in-house, but with help from contract, manufacturing-type people,” Raibert said.
“We have a plan later this year to build 100 with contract manufacturers,” he said, “and that’s the prelude to getting them in a higher-rate production which we hope to start in the middle of next year.”
Raibert declined to say what the price will be. Potential applications could range from surveillance to office deliveries to home chores.
We all laughed at the video of a robot falling over while trying to turn a doorknob.
Who’s laughing now?
In the latest creepy video from the roboticists at Boston Dynamics, one four-legged, doglike SpotMini robot walks up to a closed door, seems to peer up at the latch, then backs away to wait for another SpotMini to come around the corner.
The second robot has a mechanical arm where its head should be. It uses a hand to turn the latch, pull open the door, and keep holding it open while both robots traipse on through.
The similarities to the velociraptors’ doorknob-turning scene in “Jurassic Park” didn’t go unnoticed.
Boston Dynamics’ video of a humanoid robot executing a perfect backflip sparked a lot of dark humor, and now billionaire Elon Musk has responded with dark seriousness about the risks posed by super-intelligent, super-agile bots.
Musk suggested that future robots could move so fast they could match the fictional Flash, who eludes his comic-book foes by moving too fast for the eye to see. Compared to that superpower, doing human-level backflips is “nothing,” Musk said in a tweet.
We already know that Boston Dynamics’ robots can run with the big dogs and go dashing through the snow. But can they pick up and put away 10-pound boxes? And can they pick themselves up after being pushed down by bullies?
Yes, they can. Heaven help us, they can.
A newly released video shows the company’s next-generation, two-legged Atlas robot keeping its balance while it walks through the woods on a rough, snowy trail. But things get really eerie when Atlas is put in a warehouse setting, where the robot picks up boxes and slides them onto shelves. It just keeps going, even when a bothersome human takes a hockey stick and slaps the box out of its arms.
When the human goes into full Terminator mode and pushes Atlas over, the machine pushes itself back on its knees, straightens up, and just walks out the door.
