Spot Is Boston Dynamics' Nimble New Quadruped Robot

Boston Dynamics introduces a new quadruped that's quieter and more agile than LS3

3 min read

Spot Is Boston Dynamics' Nimble New Quadruped Robot
Spot, go fetch!
Image: Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics is infuriatingly cool. They have to be the only robotics company out there that can just post a YouTube video of an incredibly agile autonomous quadruped named “Spot” with a four sentence description, and that’s that—no info on their site, no press release, no interviews. Because they know that everybody is going to watch it and think it’s awesome anyway. Grr.

Spot is a four-legged robot designed for indoor and outdoor operation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. Spot has a sensor head that helps it navigate and negotiate rough terrain. Spot weighs about 160 lbs.

We’ve pinged our contacts at Boston Dynamics for more details, but until we hear back from them (and now that they belong to Google, we’ll probably hear from them, like, never—UPDATE 02/11/15: Boston Dynamics got back to us, so, yeah, that was sooner than “never”), let’s see what we can figure out from the video. Again, none of this comes from Boston Dynamics—it’s just us talking about what looks new here.

  • Instead of a swarm of angry bees, Spot sounds like a bad day at the dentist. It’s still hydraulic, but it’s using a battery to power the hydraulic pump instead of a gas engine. We’d be surprised if this didn’t have a significant impact on the range, endurance, and/or performance (especially payload capacity) of Spot relative to some of their other robots. However, they managed to make the most recent update of Atlas run on batteries that also power a pump, so maybe Spot is leveraging the same technology. (UPDATE: Boston Dynamics confirmed that “Spot’s power system shares some elements from the new Atlas power system.”)
  • Spot doesn’t necessarily look like it’s built specifically for speed or payload capacity, suggesting that it’s not the next generation of either LS3 or Wildcat. We’ve heard that the legs on these robots can be placed with their knees facing either backwards or forwards, but it’s (maybe) worth pointing out that Wildcat has forward facing knees (Cheetah does too), and LS3 has a mix. If I had to guess based on nothing at all, I might speculate that the LS3 leg configuration is for payload, and the Wildcat leg configuration is for speed. So maybe Spot’s legs are designed for agility? Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all. I honestly don't know.
  • Spot certainly is agile: it seems to have no problem with hills, or even stairs. I sort of think that Spot maybe doesn’t really know how to go up stairs. Like, it doesn’t care that there are stairs there, it just sees a steep and bumpy slope, and then goes up stairs like it would any other terrain. You know, they call themselves Boston Dynamics for a reason.
  • As far as sensors go, the baby Velodyne is certainly obvious. Also tucked away where Spot’s head would be (if it had a head) looks like the same sort of vision sensors that Atlas has, but it’s a bit hard to see. The Velodyne isn’t mounted in a way that it can see what’s immediately in front of the robot, so for autonomous operation, it’ll need to rely on something else for close-in sensing. The robot’s adaptability is a huge asset here, though: since it’s so dynamically stable, it doesn't need to calculate exact foot placement in advance, it can just go.

The big question that we have now (besides all of the other big questions about how this machine works and what it can do) is why does this robot exist? As in, what was it built for? Back when Boston Dynamics was primarily working for the military, it was easier to discuss potential applications, but now that the company is part of Google, maybe the reason is just “because we can, and it’s cool.”

Or maybe this is an urban delivery robot. You heard it here first, folks.

In any case, we’re very glad to see that Boston Dynamics is still making awesome robots and hasn’t completely disappeared into the Google void.

The Conversation (0)