Tag Archives: Processing

#439070 Are Digital Humans the Next Step in ...

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Android

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence has been depicted as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is embarking on that journey with its “digital humans.” These avatars act as visual interfaces for customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and other applications. UneeQ’s digital humans appear lifelike not only in terms of language and tone of voice, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a tilt of the head, a smile, even a wink. They transform a transaction into an interaction: creepy yet astonishing, human, but not quite.

What lies beneath UneeQ’s digital humans? Their 3D faces are modeled on actual human features. Speech recognition enables the avatar to understand what a person is saying, and natural language processing is used to craft a response. Before the avatar utters a word, specific emotions and facial expressions are encoded within the response.

UneeQ may be part of a larger trend towards humanizing computing. ObEN’s digital avatars serve as virtual identities for celebrities, influencers, gaming characters, and other entities in the media and entertainment industry. Meanwhile, Soul Machines is taking a more biological approach, with a “digital brain” that simulates aspects of the human brain to modulate the emotions “felt” and “expressed” by its “digital people.” Amelia is employing a similar methodology in building its “digital employees.” It emulates parts of the brain involved with memory to respond to queries and, with each interaction, learns to deliver more engaging and personalized experiences.

Shiwali Mohan, an AI systems scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, is skeptical of these digital beings. “They’re humanlike in their looks and the way they sound, but that in itself is not being human,” she says. “Being human is also how you think, how you approach problems, and how you break them down; and that takes a lot of algorithmic design. Designing for human-level intelligence is a different endeavor than designing graphics that behave like humans. If you think about the problems we’re trying to design these avatars for, we might not need something that looks like a human—it may not even be the right solution path.”

And even if these avatars appear near-human, they still evoke an uncanny valley feeling. “If something looks like a human, we have high expectations of them, but they might behave differently in ways that humans just instinctively know how other humans react. These differences give rise to the uncanny valley feeling,” says Mohan.

Yet the demand is there, with Amelia seeing high adoption of its digital employees across the financial, health care, and retail sectors. “We find that banks and insurance companies, which are so risk-averse, are leading the adoption of such disruptive technologies because they understand that the risk of non-adoption is much greater than the risk of early adoption,” says Chetan Dube, Amelia’s CEO. “Unless they innovate their business models and make them much more efficient digitally, they might be left behind.” Dube adds that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital employees in health care and retail as well.

Amelia, Soul Machines, and UneeQ are taking their digital beings a step further, enabling organizations to create avatars themselves using low-code or no-code platforms: Digital Employee Builder for Amelia, Creator for UneeQ, and Digital DNA Studio for Soul Machines. Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by Epic Games, is doing the same with MetaHuman Creator, a tool that allows anyone to create photorealistic digital humans. “The biggest motivation for Digital Employee Builder is to democratize AI,” Dube says.

Mohan is cautious about this approach. “AI has problems with bias creeping in from data sets and into the way it speaks. The AI community is still trying to figure out how to measure and counter that bias,” she says. “[Companies] have to have an AI expert on board that can recommend the right things to build for.”

Despite being wary of the technology, Mohan supports the purpose behind these virtual beings and is optimistic about where they’re headed. “We do need these tools that support humans in different kinds of things. I think the vision is the pro, and I’m behind that vision,” she says. “As we develop more sophisticated AI technology, we would then have to implement novel ways of interacting with that technology. Hopefully, all of that is designed to support humans in their goals.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#438006 Smellicopter Drone Uses Live Moth ...

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Android

Research into robotic sensing has, understandably I guess, been very human-centric. Most of us navigate and experience the world visually and in 3D, so robots tend to get covered with things like cameras and lidar. Touch is important to us, as is sound, so robots are getting pretty good with understanding tactile and auditory information, too. Smell, though? In most cases, smell doesn’t convey nearly as much information for us, so while it hasn’t exactly been ignored in robotics, it certainly isn’t the sensing modality of choice in most cases.

Part of the problem with smell sensing is that we just don’t have a good way of doing it, from a technical perspective. This has been a challenge for a long time, and it’s why we either bribe or trick animals like dogs, rats, vultures, and other animals to be our sensing systems for airborne chemicals. If only they’d do exactly what we wanted them to do all the time, this would be fine, but they don’t, so it’s not.

Until we get better at making chemical sensors, leveraging biology is the best we can do, and what would be ideal would be some sort of robot-animal hybrid cyborg thing. We’ve seen some attempts at remote controlled insects, but as it turns out, you can simplify things if you don’t use the entire insect, but instead just find a way to use its sensing system. Enter the Smellicopter.

There’s honestly not too much to say about the drone itself. It’s an open-source drone project called Crazyflie 2.0, with some additional off the shelf sensors for obstacle avoidance and stabilization. The interesting bits are a couple of passive fins that keep the drone pointed into the wind, and then the sensor, called an electroantennogram.

Image: UW

The drone’s sensor, called an electroantennogram, consists of a “single excised antenna” from a Manduca sexta hawkmoth and a custom signal processing circuit.

To make one of these sensors, you just, uh, “harvest” an antenna from a live hawkmoth. Obligingly, the moth antenna is hollow, meaning that you can stick electrodes up it. Whenever the olfactory neurons in the antenna (which is still technically alive even though it’s not attached to the moth anymore) encounter an odor that they’re looking for, they produce an electrical signal that the electrodes pick up. Plug the other ends of the electrodes into a voltage amplifier and filter, run it through an analog to digital converter, and you’ve got a chemical sensor that weighs just 1.5 gram and consumes only 2.7 mW of power. It’s significantly more sensitive than a conventional metal-oxide odor sensor, in a much smaller and more efficient form factor, making it ideal for drones.

To localize an odor, the Smellicopter uses a simple bioinspired approach called crosswind casting, which involves moving laterally left and right and then forward when an odor is detected. Here’s how it works:

The vehicle takes off to a height of 40 cm and then hovers for ten seconds to allow it time to orient upwind. The smellicopter starts casting left and right crosswind. When a volatile chemical is detected, the smellicopter will surge 25 cm upwind, and then resume casting. As long as the wind direction is fairly consistent, this strategy will bring the insect or robot increasingly closer to a singular source with each surge.

Since odors are airborne, they need a bit of a breeze to spread very far, and the Smellicopter won’t be able to detect them unless it’s downwind of the source. But, that’s just how odors work— even if you’re right next to the source, if the wind is blowing from you towards the source rather than the other way around, you might not catch a whiff of it.

Whenever the olfactory neurons in the antenna encounter an odor that they’re looking for, they produce an electrical signal that the electrodes pick up

There are a few other constraints to keep in mind with this sensor as well. First, rather than detecting something useful (like explosives), it’s going to detect the smells of pretty flowers, because moths like pretty flowers. Second, the antenna will literally go dead on you within a couple hours, since it only functions while its tissues are alive and metaphorically kicking. Interestingly, it may be possible to use CRISPR-based genetic modification to breed moths with antennae that do respond to useful smells, which would be a neat trick, and we asked the researchers—Melanie Anderson, a doctoral student of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle; Thomas Daniel, a UW professor of biology; and Sawyer Fuller, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering—about this, along with some other burning questions, via email.

IEEE Spectrum, asking the important questions first: So who came up with “Smellicopter”?

Melanie Anderson: Tom Daniel coined the term “Smellicopter”. Another runner up was “OdorRotor”!

In general, how much better are moths at odor localization than robots?

Melanie Anderson: Moths are excellent at odor detection and odor localization and need to be in order to find mates and food. Their antennae are much more sensitive and specialized than any portable man-made odor sensor. We can't ask the moths how exactly they search for odors so well, but being able to have the odor sensitivity of a moth on a flying platform is a big step in that direction.

Tom Daniel: Our best estimate is that they outperform robotic sensing by at least three orders of magnitude.

How does the localization behavior of the Smellicopter compare to that of a real moth?

Anderson: The cast-and-surge odor search strategy is a simplified version of what we believe the moth (and many other odor searching animals) are doing. It is a reactive strategy that relies on the knowledge that if you detect odor, you can assume that the source is somewhere up-wind of you. When you detect odor, you simply move upwind, and when you lose the odor signal you cast in a cross-wind direction until you regain the signal.

Can you elaborate on the potential for CRISPR to be able to engineer moths for the detection of specific chemicals?

Anderson: CRISPR is already currently being used to modify the odor detection pathways in moth species. It is one of our future efforts to specifically use this to make the antennae sensitive to other chemicals of interest, such as the chemical scent of explosives.

Sawyer Fuller: We think that one of the strengths of using a moth's antenna, in addition to its speed, is that it may provide a path to both high chemical specificity as well as high sensitivity. By expressing a preponderance of only one or a few chemosensors, we are anticipating that a moth antenna will give a strong response only to that chemical. There are several efforts underway in other research groups to make such specific, sensitive chemical detectors. Chemical sensing is an area where biology exceeds man-made systems in terms of efficiency, small size, and sensitivity. So that's why we think that the approach of trying to leverage biological machinery that already exists has some merit.

You mention that the antennae lifespan can be extended for a few days with ice- how feasible do you think this technology is outside of a research context?

Anderson: The antennae can be stored in tiny vials in a standard refrigerator or just with an ice pack to extend their life to about a week. Additionally, the process for attaching the antenna to the electrical circuit is a teachable skill. It is definitely feasible outside of a research context.

Considering the trajectory that sensor development is on, how long do you think that this biological sensor system will outperform conventional alternatives?

Anderson: It's hard to speak toward what will happen in the future, but currently, the moth antenna still stands out among any commercially-available portable sensors.

There have been some experiments with cybernetic insects; what are the advantages and disadvantages of your approach, as opposed to (say) putting some sort of tracking system on a live moth?

Daniel: I was part of a cyber insect team a number of years ago. The challenge of such research is that the animal has natural reactions to attempts to steer or control it.

Anderson: While moths are better at odor tracking than robots currently, the advantage of the drone platform is that we have control over it. We can tell it to constrain the search to a certain area, and return after it finishes searching.

What can you tell us about the health, happiness, and overall wellfare of the moths in your experiments?

Anderson: The moths are cold anesthetized before the antennae are removed. They are then frozen so that they can be used for teaching purposes or in other research efforts.

What are you working on next?

Daniel: The four big efforts are (1) CRISPR modification, (2) experiments aimed at improving the longevity of the antennal preparation, (3) improved measurements of antennal electrical responses to odors combined with machine learning to see if we can classify different odors, and (4) flight in outdoor environments.

Fuller: The moth's antenna sensor gives us a new ability to sense with a much shorter latency than was previously possible with similarly-sized sensors (e.g. semiconductor sensors). What exactly a robot agent should do to best take advantage of this is an open question. In particular, I think the speed may help it to zero in on plume sources in complex environments much more quickly. Think of places like indoor settings with flow down hallways that splits out at doorways, and in industrial settings festooned with pipes and equipment. We know that it is possible to search out and find odors in such scenarios, as anybody who has had to contend with an outbreak of fruit flies can attest. It is also known that these animals respond very quickly to sudden changes in odor that is present in such turbulent, patchy plumes. Since it is hard to reduce such plumes to a simple model, we think that machine learning may provide insights into how to best take advantage of the improved temporal plume information we now have available.

Tom Daniel also points out that the relative simplicity of this project (now that the UW researchers have it all figured out, that is) means that even high school students could potentially get involved in it, even if it’s on a ground robot rather than a drone. All the details are in the paper that was just published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437896 Solar-based Electronic Skin Generates ...

Posted on December 13, 2020 by Android

Replicating the human sense of touch is complicated—electronic skins need to be flexible, stretchable, and sensitive to temperature, pressure and texture; they need to be able to read biological data and provide electronic readouts. Therefore, how to power electronic skin for continuous, real-time use is a big challenge.

To address this, researchers from Glasgow University have developed an energy-generating e-skin made out of miniaturized solar cells, without dedicated touch sensors. The solar cells not only generate their own power—and some surplus—but also provide tactile capabilities for touch and proximity sensing. An early-view paper of their findings was published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

When exposed to a light source, the solar cells on the s-skin generate energy. If a cell is shadowed by an approaching object, the intensity of the light, and therefore the energy generated, reduces, dropping to zero when the cell makes contact with the object, confirming touch. In proximity mode, the light intensity tells you how far the object is with respect to the cell. “In real time, you can then compare the light intensity…and after calibration find out the distances,” says Ravinder Dahiya of the Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) Group, James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, where the study was carried out. The team used infra-red LEDs with the solar cells for proximity sensing for better results.

To demonstrate their concept, the researchers wrapped a generic 3D-printed robotic hand in their solar skin, which was then recorded interacting with its environment. The proof-of-concept tests showed an energy surplus of 383.3 mW from the palm of the robotic arm. “The eSkin could generate more than 100 W if present over the whole body area,” they reported in their paper.

“If you look at autonomous, battery-powered robots, putting an electronic skin [that] is consuming energy is a big problem because then it leads to reduced operational time,” says Dahiya. “On the other hand, if you have a skin which generates energy, then…it improves the operational time because you can continue to charge [during operation].” In essence, he says, they turned a challenge—how to power the large surface area of the skin—into an opportunity—by turning it into an energy-generating resource.

Dahiya envisages numerous applications for BEST’s innovative e-skin, given its material-integrated sensing capabilities, apart from the obvious use in robotics. For instance, in prosthetics: “[As] we are using [a] solar cell as a touch sensor itself…we are also [making it] less bulkier than other electronic skins.” This, he adds, will help create prosthetics that are of optimal weight and size, thus making it easier for prosthetics users. “If you look at electronic skin research, the the real action starts after it makes contact… Solar skin is a step ahead, because it will start to work when the object is approaching…[and] have more time to prepare for action.” This could effectively reduce the time lag that is often seen in brain–computer interfaces.

There are also possibilities in the automation sector, particularly in electrical and interactive vehicles. A car covered with solar e-skin, because of its proximity-sensing capabilities, would be able to “see” an approaching obstacle or a person. It isn’t “seeing” in the biological sense, Dahiya clarifies, but from the point of view of a machine. This can be integrated with other objects, not just cars, for a variety of uses. “Gestures can be recognized as well…[which] could be used for gesture-based control…in gaming or in other sectors.”

In the lab, tests were conducted with a single source of white light at 650 lux, but Dahiya feels there are interesting possibilities if they could work with multiple light sources that the e-skin could differentiate between. “We are exploring different AI techniques [for that],” he says, “processing the data in an innovative way [so] that we can identify the the directions of the light sources as well as the object.”

The BEST team’s achievement brings us closer to a flexible, self-powered, cost-effective electronic skin that can touch as well as “see.” At the moment, however, there are still some challenges. One of them is flexibility. In their prototype, they used commercial solar cells made of amorphous silicon, each 1cm x 1cm. “They are not flexible, but they are integrated on a flexible substrate,” Dahiya says. “We are currently exploring nanowire-based solar cells…[with which] we we hope to achieve good performance in terms of energy as well as sensing functionality.” Another shortcoming is what Dahiya calls “the integration challenge”—how to make the solar skin work with different materials. Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437869 Video Friday: Japan’s Gundam Robot ...

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Android

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

ACRA 2020 – December 8-10, 2020 – [Online]
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Another BIG step for Japan’s Gundam project.

[ Gundam Factory ]

We present an interactive design system that allows users to create sculpting styles and fabricate clay models using a standard 6-axis robot arm. Given a general mesh as input, the user iteratively selects sub-areas of the mesh through decomposition and embeds the design expression into an initial set of toolpaths by modifying key parameters that affect the visual appearance of the sculpted surface finish. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by designing and fabricating different sculpting styles over a wide range of clay models.

[ Disney Research ]

China’s Chang’e-5 completed the drilling, sampling and sealing of lunar soil at 04:53 BJT on Wednesday, marking the first automatic sampling on the Moon, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced Wednesday.

[ CCTV ]

Red Hat’s been putting together an excellent documentary on Willow Garage and ROS, and all five parts have just been released. We posted Part 1 a little while ago, so here’s Part 2 and Part 3.

Parts 4 and 5 are at the link below!

[ Red Hat ]

Congratulations to ANYbotics on a well-deserved raise!

ANYbotics has origins in the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, and ANYmal’s heritage can be traced back at least as far as StarlETH, which we first met at ICRA 2013.

[ ANYbotics ]

Most conventional robots are working with 0.05-0.1mm accuracy. Such accuracy requires high-end components like low-backlash gears, high-resolution encoders, complicated CNC parts, powerful motor drives, etc. Those in combination end up an expensive solution, which is either unaffordable or unnecessary for many applications. As a result, we found the Apicoo Robotics to provide our customers solutions with a much lower cost and higher stability.

[ Apicoo Robotics ]

The Skydio 2 is an incredible drone that can take incredible footage fully autonomously, but it definitely helps if you do incredible things in incredible places.

[ Skydio ]

Jueying is the first domestic sensitive quadruped robot for industry applications and scenarios. It can coordinate (replace) humans to reach any place that can be reached. It has superior environmental adaptability, excellent dynamic balance capabilities and precise Environmental perception capabilities. By carrying functional modules for different application scenarios in the safe load area, the mobile superiority of the quadruped robot can be organically integrated with the commercialization of functional modules, providing smart factories, smart parks, scene display and public safety application solutions.

[ DeepRobotics ]

We have developed semi-autonomous quadruped robot, called LASER-D (Legged-Agile-Smart-Efficient Robot for Disinfection) for performing disinfection in cluttered environments. The robot is equipped with a spray-based disinfection system and leverages the body motion to controlling the spray action without the need for an extra stabilization mechanism. The system includes an image processing capability to verify disinfected regions with high accuracy. This system allows the robot to successfully carry out effective disinfection tasks while safely traversing through cluttered environments, climb stairs/slopes, and navigate on slippery surfaces.

[ USC Viterbi ]

We propose the “multi-vision hand”, in which a number of small high-speed cameras are mounted on the robot hand of a common 7 degrees-of-freedom robot. Also, we propose visual-servoing control by using a multi-vision system that combines the multi-vision hand and external fixed high-speed cameras. The target task was ball catching motion, which requires high-speed operation. In the proposed catching control, the catch position of the ball, which is estimated by the external fixed high-speed cameras, is corrected by the multi-vision hand in real-time.

More details available through IROS on-demand.

[ Namiki Laboratory ]

Shunichi Kurumaya wrote in to share his work on PneuFinger, a pneumatically actuated compliant robotic gripping system.

[ Nakamura Lab ]

Thanks Shunichi!

Motivated by insights into the human teaching process, we introduce a method for incorporating unstructured natural language into imitation learning. At training time, the expert can provide demonstrations along with verbal descriptions in order to describe the underlying intent, e.g., “Go to the large green bowl’’. The training process, then, interrelates the different modalities to encode the correlations between language, perception, and motion. The resulting language-conditioned visuomotor policies can be conditioned at run time on new human commands and instructions, which allows for more fine-grained control over the trained policies while also reducing situational ambiguity.

[ ASU ]

Thanks Heni!

Gita is on sale for the holidays for only $2,000.

[ Gita ]

This video introduces a computational approach for routing thin artificial muscle actuators through hyperelastic soft robots, in order to achieve a desired deformation behavior. Provided with a robot design, and a set of example deformations, we continuously co-optimize the routing of actuators, and their actuation, to approximate example deformations as closely as possible.

[ Disney Research ]

Researchers and mountain rescuers in Switzerland are making huge progress in the field of autonomous drones as the technology becomes more in-demand for global search-and-rescue operations.

[ SWI ]

This short clip of the Ghost Robotics V60 features an interesting, if awkward looking, righting behavior at the end.

[ Ghost Robotics ]

Europe’s Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover has a younger ’sibling’, ExoMy. The blueprints and software for this mini-version of the full-size Mars explorer are available for free so that anyone can 3D print, assemble and program their own ExoMy.

[ ESA ]

The holiday season is here, and with the added impact of Covid-19 consumer demand is at an all-time high. Berkshire Grey is the partner that today’s leading organizations turn to when it comes to fulfillment automation.

[ Berkshire Grey ]

Until very recently, the vast majority of studies and reports on the use of cargo drones for public health were almost exclusively focused on the technology. The driving interest from was on the range that these drones could travel, how much they could carry and how they worked. Little to no attention was placed on the human side of these projects. Community perception, community engagement, consent and stakeholder feedback were rarely if ever addressed. This webinar presents the findings from a very recent study that finally sheds some light on the human side of drone delivery projects.

[ WeRobotics ] Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots

#437851 Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot Dog ...

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Android

Boston Dynamics has been fielding questions about when its robots are going to go on sale and how much they’ll cost for at least a dozen years now. I can say this with confidence, because that’s how long I’ve been a robotics journalist, and I’ve been pestering them about it the entire time. But it’s only relatively recently that the company started to make a concerted push away from developing robots exclusively for the likes of DARPA into platforms with more commercial potential, starting with a compact legged robot called Spot, first introduced in 2016.

Since then, we’ve been following closely as Spot has gone from a research platform to a product, and today, Boston Dynamics is announcing the final step in that process: commercial availability. You can now order a Spot Explorer Kit from the Boston Dynamics online store for US $74,500 (plus tax), shipping included, with delivery in 6 to 8 weeks. FINALLY!

Over the past 10 months or so, Boston Dynamics has leased Spot robots to carefully selected companies, research groups, and even a few individuals as part of their early adopter program—that’s where all of the clips in the video below came from. While there are over 100 Spots out in the world right now, getting one of them has required convincing Boston Dynamics up front that you knew more or less exactly what you wanted to do and how you wanted to do it. If you’re a big construction company or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or Adam Savage, that’s all well and good, but for other folks who think that a Spot could be useful for them somehow and want to give it a shot, this new availability provides a fewer-strings attached opportunity to do some experimentation with the robot.

There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in that video, but we were told that the one thing that really stood out to the folks at Boston Dynamics was a 2-second clip that you can see on the left-hand side of the screen from 0:19 to 0:21. In it, Spot is somehow managing to walk across a spider web of rebar without getting tripped up, at faster than human speed. This isn’t something that Spot was specifically programmed to do, and in fact the Spot User Guide specifically identifies “rebar mesh” as an unsafe operating environment. But the robot just handles it, and that’s a big part of what makes Spot so useful—its ability to deal with (almost) whatever you can throw at it.

Before you get too excited, Boston Dynamics is fairly explicit that the current license for the robot is intended for commercial use, and the company specifically doesn’t want people to be just using it at home for fun. We know this because we asked (of course we asked), and they told us “we specifically don’t want people to just be using it at home for fun.” Drat. You can still buy one as an individual, but you have to promise that you’ll follow the terms of use and user guidelines, and it sounds like using a robot in your house might be the second-fastest way to invalidate your warranty:

SPOT IS AN AMAZING ROBOT, BUT IS NOT CERTIFIED SAFE FOR IN-HOME USE OR INTENDED FOR USE NEAR CHILDREN OR OTHERS WHO MAY NOT APPRECIATE THE HAZARDS ASSOCIATED WITH ITS OPERATION.

Not being able to get Spot to play with your kids may be disappointing, but for those of you with the sort of kids who are also students, the good news is that Boston Dynamics has carved out a niche for academic institutions, which can buy Spot at a discounted price. And if you want to buy a whole pack of Spots, there’s a bulk discount for Enterprise users as well.

What do you get for $74,500? All this!

Spot robot
Spot battery (2x)
Spot charger
Tablet controller and charger
Robot case for storage and transportation
FREE SHIPPING!

Photo: Boston Dynamics

The basic package includes the robot, two batteries, charger, a tablet controller, and a storage case.

You can view detailed specs here.

So is $75k a lot of money for a robot like Spot, or not all that much? We don’t have many useful points of comparison, partially because it’s not clear to what extent other pre-commercial quadrupedal robots (like ANYmal or Aliengo) share capabilities and features with Spot. For more perspective on Spot’s price tag, we spoke to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at Boston Dynamics.

IEEE Spectrum: Why is Spot so affordable?

Michael Perry: The main goal of selling the robot at this stage is to try to get it into the hands of as many application developers as possible, so that we can learn from the community what the biggest driver of value is for Spot. As a platform, unlocking the value of an ecosystem is our core focus right now.

Spectrum: Why is Spot so expensive?

Perry: Expensive is relative, but compared to the initial prototypes of Spot, we’ve been able to drop down the cost pretty significantly. One key thing has been designing it for robustness—we’ve put hundreds and hundreds of hours on the robot to make sure that it’s able to be successful when it falls, or when it has an electrostatic discharge. We’ve made sure that it’s able to perceive a wide variety of environments that are difficult for traditional vision-based sensors to handle. A lot of that engineering is baked into the core product so that you don’t have to worry about the mobility or robotic side of the equation, you can just focus on application development.

Photos: Boston Dynamics

Accessories for Spot include [clockwise from top left]: Spot GXP with additional ports for payload integration; Spot CAM with panorama camera and advanced comms; Spot CAM+ with pan-tilt-zoom camera for inspections; Spot EAP with lidar to enhance autonomy on large sites; Spot EAP+ with Spot CAM camera plus lidar; and Spot CORE for additional processing power.

The $75k that you’ll pay for the Spot Explorer Kit, it’s important to note, is just the base price for the robot. As with other things that fall into this price range (like a luxury car), there are all kinds of fun ways to drive that cost up with accessories, although for Spot, some of those accessories will be necessary for many (if not most) applications. For example, a couple of expansion ports to make it easier to install your own payloads on Spot will run you $1,275. An additional battery is $4,620. And if you want to really get some work done, the Enhanced Autonomy Package (with 360 cameras, lights, better comms, and a Velodyne VLP-16) will set you back an additional $34,570. If you were hoping for an arm, you’ll have to wait until the end of the year.

Each Spot also includes a year’s worth of software updates and a warranty, although the standard warranty just covers “defects related to materials and workmanship” not “I drove my robot off a cliff” or “I tried to take my robot swimming.” For that sort of thing (user error) to be covered, you’ll need to upgrade to the $12,000 Spot CARE premium service plan to cover your robot for a year as long as you don’t subject it to willful abuse, which both of those examples I just gave probably qualify as.

While we’re on the subject of robot abuse, Boston Dynamics has very sensibly devoted a substantial amount of the Spot User Guide to help new users understand how they should not be using their robot, in order to “lessen the risk of serious injury, death, or robot and other property damage.” According to the guide, some things that could cause Spot to fall include holes, cliffs, slippery surfaces (like ice and wet grass), and cords. Spot’s sensors also get confused by “transparent, mirrored, or very bright obstacles,” and the guide specifically says Spot “may crash into glass doors and windows.” Also this: “Spot cannot predict trajectories of moving objects. Do not operate Spot around moving objects such as vehicles, children, or pets.”

We should emphasize that this is all totally reasonable, and while there are certainly a lot of things to be aware of, it’s frankly astonishing that these are the only things that Boston Dynamics explicitly warns users against. Obviously, not every potentially unsafe situation or thing is described above, but the point is that Boston Dynamics is willing to say to new users, “here’s your robot, go do stuff with it” without feeling the need to hold their hand the entire time.

There’s one more thing to be aware of before you decide to buy a Spot, which is the following:

“All orders will be subject to Boston Dynamics’ Terms and Conditions of Sale which require the beneficial use of its robots.”

Specifically, this appears to mean that you aren’t allowed to (or supposed to) use the robot in a way that could hurt living things, or “as a weapon, or to enable any weapon.” The conditions of sale also prohibit using the robot for “any illegal or ultra-hazardous purpose,” and there’s some stuff in there about it not being cool to use Spot for “nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons proliferation, or development of missile technology,” which seems weirdly specific.

“Once you make a technology more broadly available, the story of it starts slipping out of your hands. Our hope is that ahead of time we’re able to clearly articulate the beneficial uses of the robot in environments where we think the robot has a high potential to reduce the risk to people, rather than potentially causing harm.”
—Michael Perry, Boston Dynamics

I’m very glad that Boston Dynamics is being so upfront about requiring that Spot is used beneficially. However, it does put the company in a somewhat challenging position now that these robots are being sold. Boston Dynamics can (and will) perform some amount of due-diligence before shipping a Spot, but ultimately, once the robots are in someone else’s hands, there’s only so much that BD can do.

Spectrum: Why is beneficial use important to Boston Dynamics?

Perry: One of the key things that we’ve highlighted many times in our license and terms of use is that we don’t want to see the robot being used in any way that inflicts physical harm on people or animals. There are philosophical reasons for that—I think all of us don’t want to see our technology used in a way that would hurt people. But also from a business perspective, robots are really terrible at conveying intention. In order for the robot to be helpful long-term, it has to be trusted as a piece of technology. So rather than looking at a robot and wondering, “is this something that could potentially hurt me,” we want people to think “this is a robot that’s here to help me.” To the extent that people associate Boston Dynamics with cutting edge robots, we think that this is an important stance for the rollout of our first commercial product. If we find out that somebody’s violated our terms of use, their warranty is invalidated, we won’t repair their product, and we have a licensing timeout that would prevent them from accessing their robot after that timeout has expired. It’s a remediation path, but we do think that it’s important to at least provide that as something that helps enforce our position on use of our technology.

It’s very important to keep all of this in context: Spot is a tool. It’s got some autonomy and the appearance of agency, but it’s still just doing what people tell it to do, even if those things might be unsafe. If you read through the user guide, it’s clear how much of an effort Boston Dynamics is making to try to convey the importance of safety to Spot users—and ultimately, barring some unforeseen and catastrophic software or hardware issues, safety is about the users, rather than Boston Dynamics or Spot itself. I bring this up because as we start seeing more and more Spots doing things without Boston Dynamics watching over them quite so closely, accidents are likely inevitable. Spot might step on someone’s foot. It might knock someone over. If Spot was perfectly safe, it wouldn’t be useful, and we have to acknowledge that its impressive capabilities come with some risks, too.

Photo: Boston Dynamics

Each Spot includes a year’s worth of software updates and a warranty, although the standard warranty just covers “defects related to materials and workmanship” not “I drove my robot off a cliff.”

Now that Spot is on the market for real, we’re excited to see who steps up and orders one. Depending on who the potential customer is, Spot could either seem like an impossibly sophisticated piece of technology that they’d never be able to use, or a magical way of solving all of their problems overnight. In reality, it’s of course neither of those things. For the former (folks with an idea but without a lot of robotics knowledge or experience), Spot does a lot out of the box, but BD is happy to talk with people and facilitate connections with partners who might be able to integrate specific software and hardware to get Spot to do a unique task. And for the latter (who may also be folks with an idea but without a lot of robotics knowledge or experience), BD’s Perry offers a reminder Spot is not Rosie the Robot, and would be equally happy to talk about what the technology is actually capable of doing.

Looking forward a bit, we asked Perry whether Spot’s capabilities mean that customers are starting to think beyond using robots to simply replace humans, and are instead looking at them as a way of enabling a completely different way of getting things done.

Spectrum: Do customers interested in Spot tend to think of it as a way of replacing humans at a specific task, or as a system that can do things that humans aren’t able to do?

Perry: There are what I imagine as three levels of people understanding the robot applications. Right now, we’re at level one, where you take a person out of this dangerous, dull job, and put a robot in. That’s the entry point. The second level is, using the robot, can we increase the production of that task? For example, take site documentation on a construction site—right now, people do 360 image capture of a site maybe once a week, and they might do a laser scan of the site once per project. At the second level, the question is, what if you were able to get that data collection every day, or multiple times a day? What kinds of benefits would that add to your process? To continue the construction example, the third level would be, how could we completely redesign this space now that we know that this type of automation is available? To take one example, there are some things that we cannot physically build because it’s too unsafe for people to be a part of that process, but if you were to apply robotics to that process, then you could potentially open up a huge envelope of design that has been inaccessible to people.

To order a Spot of your very own, visit shop.bostondynamics.com.

A version of this post appears in the August 2020 print issue as “$74,500 Will Fetch You a Spot.” Continue reading →

Posted in Human Robots