Boston Dynamics is Cyberdyne Systems

2013-11-13:  Combat support

Pfc. Marcus Beedle looks over his shoulder at the robot following him. The machine’s 4 legs are eagerly stamping the grass, its sensor-laden head held high. “LS3, follow tight,” Beedle says to the robot, and the Legged Squad Support System—which stands taller than a dog but smaller than a mule—follows in the exact footsteps of its Marine Corps handler. Beedle’s backpack is outfitted with thick black bands. To follow him, the robot senses this pattern via the flickering laser in its head. LS3 also uses stereoscopic cameras to fix on the Marine’s location and can trace the path he’s taken by following a navigation device strapped to Beedle’s right shoe. As the young private first class strides forward, the LS3 obediently trots after him, exhaust from its gas engine sputtering. “Follow-the-leader is our bread and butter”.

2013-12-14: This is a far more interesting take than all the terminator jokes which are neither insightful, original, or clever.

News broke today that Google acquired my friend Marc Raibert’s company, Boston Dynamics, one of the coolest robotics companies in the world. You know Boston Dynamics because of their work building “Big Dog,” “Bigger Dog,” Cheetah and now Atlas. They’ve been the most impressive functional robots around.

What’s bigger news is that this is their 8th announced robotics acquisition in the last 6 months. Remember that Google is spending over $7B every year in R&D, M&A.

This internal robotics revolution is being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who developed and ran Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software. This is being done with Larry Page’s enthusiastic support, as he and his team continue to display their impressive “moonshot thinking” by investing heavily in the future.

Don’t forget that Google is probably the No. 1 hotbed of research on artificial intelligence with the acquisition of my friend and SU Co-Founder Ray Kurzweil and the recent addition of Deep Learning creator Geoffrey Hinton.

So what do you get when you combine 8 robotics companies, the leading AI creative forces and researchers, the brilliance (and ambition) of Larry Page and a $7B R&D budget?

I think it will be the transformation of our society — how we work, how we learn, take care of our sick, conduct our commerce, explore, handle disasters, fight wars… everything.

If this level of transformation isn’t on your radar, if you are not thinking about how this will change your life, your business and your industry, then you are missing it, big time.

You need to understand the implications of this, and figure out how you are going to surf on top of this tsunami… not be crushed by it.

If you like, on January 9th and 10th, 2014, at the Ritz-Carlton hotel (Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles), I’ll be teaching entrepreneurs about robotics, AI and other exponential technologies, how you can think bold and take action globally, and how to leverage such powerful tools as crowd funding and incentive competitions.

And here are some Boston Dynamics videos, so you can see the robots in action:
Big Dog:

Cheetah:

Atlas:

2016-03-18: Boston Dynamics are an evolutionary dead end

Boston Dynamics are very successful pioneers. But their algorithms are not based on Deep Learning principles. And Google is leading the world in Deep Learning and can apply it to anything they want, including robotics. DL based algorithms do not provide a complete robotics solution today but there is wide agreement that this is the best path forward for the field. Why is this important? The difference is robots that can walk vs robots that can dance ballet. The goal is “graceful locomotion” which will be an order of magnitude more adaptive, more energy efficient, and faster than the current generation of robots.

2019-04-02: Handle

Kinema’s software—which is robot-agnostic, meaning it already works on a range of robots beyond Handle—helps the machine through all these challenges. “Their system is able to look at a stack of boxes, and no matter how ordered or disordered the boxes are, or the markings on top, or the lighting conditions, they’re able to figure out which boxes are discrete from each other and to plan a path for grabbing the box.” That’s a huge part of what Handle, a robot designed to work in warehouses, needs to do.

2023-05-16: Some much needed competition. Boston Dynamics is moving at a snails pace.