What's up? MKBHD here. This is Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot dog.
So you may recognize the name Boston Dynamics from these kind of terrifying videos from a few years ago. You might have seen these or maybe these part scary part maybe a little sad videos or even this recent video of it being spotted out in public that I tweeted. with some feelings about it in 2020. But I think a lot of people when talking about it saw that one Black Mirror episode, which may have been loosely inspired, okay, maybe heavily inspired by the Boston Dynamics projects, but this is Dope Tech.
And I actually got to spend some time up in Boston with the team that actually works on this. And so here, I'm gonna show you everything I learned about what Spot actually is and what it can actually do right now in 2020. Okay, so what is Spot? So Spot is a quadruped robot that's basically a computer, battery, and sensors all together on top of some motors and metal and joints in the shape of legs. Does that make sense?
Spot is mostly metal, so weighs around 60 pounds, pretty hefty, and it's the most refined version yet of this remote control dog concept. So you can see there's five sets of cameras all around. There's two main sets in the front.
We'll call that the face. And then there is a matching set on each side and a set of cameras at the butt. So each one of these cameras sees in stereo vision and along with gyroscopes and sensors inside, all this is feeding information to the computer at all times about how to control the motors to keep spot balanced. So take that, then add some shoulder harnesses to pick it up.
some rubber nubs for feet, and some appropriate ventilation for the computer inside, and you got yourself a robot dog. And of course, one that looks a lot more slim and friendly than previous iterations of the robot dog. Maybe the best example of that is the battery, actually. So Spot has a little interchangeable battery in the belly area.
It's an 11,500 milliamp hour battery pack, and that powers Spot for around 90 minutes on a charge. But that, of course, depends. on the payload weight and how much you're actually using it. Matter of fact, Spot is actually using energy here, actively balancing, even when it's just standing still.
So your mileage may vary. So Spot's controller is essentially an Android tablet with some buttons and joysticks. And so it's running the Spot Android app that Boston Dynamics coded, so it can talk directly to Spot or even via a remote connection from many miles away. And honestly, the most impressive part of the controls was how easy it was.
Like I got maybe a 90 second demo with a controller and that for me was enough to know maybe 90% of the things that Spot can do right off the bat. Maybe it's because I loved RC cars, I was always into this type of thing, but it was super simple. So the left joystick moves the robot forward and backward and side to side, and the right joystick is just for rotation clockwise or counterclockwise.
So you basically combine these two joysticks and you can direct Spot pretty much anywhere you want him to go. The screen, as you're moving, will show the camera feed from any of the cameras you want. Of course, it's helpful to have the forward-facing camera pulled up, and that gives you a pretty good idea of where it's going.
And then you can also change things like the height and the speed. So Spot likes to be about in the middle height as he's walking for efficiency and balance, but you can change that. And you have up to three speeds. Slow, medium, or fast, Spot can go up to 1.4 mps or about 3 mph in fast mode. They've tested faster speeds, but this gait is a lot more approachable and stable and predictable.
So Spot has a couple modes, some of them are perfectly reasonable, and some of them are just kind of feel like showing off. First of all, Spot can sit and turn all the motors off, of course. So when it's in sit mode, it's just chilling. You can turn it on and then it'll go into stand mode. And in stand mode, you can move it around to look around without actually walking.
And this might be when it looks the most dog-like and it can give you a little head tilt and all this crazy stuff. But like I said, when it's standing, the motors are still on for self-balancing and you can quickly see. If a strong wind blows, or even as I literally try to push it over, it catches itself and stays on its feet.
So that's stand mode. Then there's walk mode. Okay, so this is a normal walking gait that you see the most often.
It's taking one step forward with the diagonal opposite leg, like a normal dog would walk, for example. Front left, back right, front right, back left. And this is the mode that goes up to its max speed. which is honestly faster than it sounds. Now it is only 3 miles an hour, like I said, you can definitely still outrun it in case you were thinking about that, but it's still impressively fast and just the way the legs move so crazy quickly and fluidly and confidently is wild to watch.
Then there's crawl mode, which is a bit slower but it's being a little bit more careful, more deliberate. That's keeping three paws. or feet on the ground at all times and only lifting one at a time.
So that's useful in more loose gravel type situations and uneven terrain. Then there's a hop mode, which, okay, now that that just feels like showing off, like the robot hops back and forth between paws, five on one side, five on the other side. I don't know when you would ever need to do this.
It's just more using energy and it isn't super efficient. But, you know, if you slow it down. in the footage you can actually see that spot is completely airborne off the ground between hops, which I guess makes a cool demo.
Most of Spot's time though I think will be spent in walk mode, where it can handle the vast majority of surfaces and pavement and all that type of stuff even if it's uneven. Spot walks over debris and branches and up and down hills through shrubs basically typically with no problem. And on flat ground it just makes it look easy. It looks like another dog That is until he gets to a set of stairs.
Yeah, so Spot has a stairs mode. And it's really good, as you can tell. It kind of effortlessly, naturally glides up this very specific man-made creation that is a set of stairs. And it can go forward or backward.
Spot doesn't really care as long as it can see where it's going. That to me was really impressive. Every paw immediately went up to the next step, down to the next step, and there was never any hint of hesitation or slowing down.
And this stair climbing is just a small sign of Spot's greater intelligence. Okay, so Spot is actually smarter than he seems. I am holding a controller most of the time, but that's only part of the story.
So like I said at the beginning, Spot, it's a computer. And the computer is using all these sensors and cameras to build a 3D model of the world around it in real time as it's walking. That's what the computer is doing.
And so because of that, it has these built-in features like obstacle avoidance and ground height detection. And they work really, really well. So basically, when these smart features are all on, pressing the joystick forward is merely a suggestion that the robot should go straight forward.
But like I can walk Spot right at this box, which is an obstacle, just holding the stick forward, and you can see Spot drop a shoulder and dodge it to walk around it. And that's completely on Spot's own awareness. That's the robot doing it with no extra input from me. I was just telling Spot to walk forward and he did the rest. And the ground height detection is important too, so it's always mapping what's in front and the height of what your next step should be.
So with that feature turned off, you can actually see it walking into a curb and it kind of trips its way onto the higher ground before correcting itself. But with that feature on, it already knows to take a higher step when there's a curb in front of it. It doesn't trip at all.
And if there's ever an obstacle in front of it, it's mapped out the whole thing and it already knows how high each step should be to climb over something like a real dog would know if it was walking over the same thing. But I will say Spot is still a robot. And so it is after all not.
exactly perfect. Part of what they will do out here near Boston is push these robots to the limit to try to find what needs improving, to figure out what can be built better, smoother, or more consistently. So for example, one of the situational awareness One of the areas that Spot needs the most work is object detection because Spot's cameras have a hard time telling what objects are solid versus not so solid.
So where a human would instinctively know you can't step on snow the same way as rocks or dirt versus leaves, sometimes Spot has to step on it to figure it out. So sometimes things like bushes or plants can confuse him when he thinks he can't step on them. So yeah, no robot is perfect.
But you have to remember, that's the whole point of this testing. They're always pushing it to the limit to figure out how to make Spot better, and so they will often fail. What happens when Spot fails? Well, as you can see, he's gotten pretty good at this whole self-writing thing to get back up.
So if he's fallen down, he can self-write. Even if he's upside down, they can flip back over. And as we saw, a lot of times he'll catch himself before he's actually fallen in the first place. So he does a pretty good job of awaiting failure. But if he does fail, he has a move to get out of it.
Okay, so probably the most common question after seeing all of this is why? Why have you created this? Why does Spot exist in the first place?
And the answer... I actually think it's pretty simple. Think of it as the Mars rover for Earth. So we sent a rover to Mars because it was impossible, or at least way too risky, to send humans to Mars to do this job.
But we wanted to send someone, something, to take photos, collect soil samples, take measurements, conduct a few experiments, and send the results back to Earth. So that's how we got the incredible Curiosity rover and more recently the Perseverance rover that just launched less than a month ago and is scheduled to arrive at Mars to conduct more experiments in February of next year. So I think of SPOT as the same thing for Earth.
You can send SPOT into dangerous partially collapsed buildings, through remote tunnels, through extreme weather conditions. You can send it into a house with measuring equipment to get a measurement to see if the air has been leaking any sort of of toxic gases. You can send it all sorts of places that you wouldn't want to send a human because it's too risky or they couldn't do it the same way. So you see these rails up here at the top of Spot? That's for standardized mounting hardware.
And these two rubber nubs, these are actually covers for data ports. So with the rails and ports, you can attach modules to Spot to carry out these types of surveying, mapping, and measuring tasks. And that's what makes him.
So useful. Also, I'm not sure if Spot is him or her or it. I don't know.
It's a robot. Either way, Spot has also already been useful in construction environments where clients have mapped out predetermined routes with no controller needed. So Spot can go in this construction and take progress photos from the exact same angle and location every day for several days in a row. Like that's something humans honestly probably wouldn't even be that good at.
There's also... companies working with Boston Dynamics on building modules for their own applications, and Boston Dynamics has built a few of their own, mostly involving cameras and radar and mapping software. And so Spot is simply a vehicle that will carry these modules around, a really advanced, lifelike vehicle with four legs that obeys your every command.
Now if after seeing all this you're still concerned about the potential future from that Black Mirror episode, don't worry, the people who work here have seen that episode, and they have no intention of creating or allowing a future where robots just take over the world. But it's also super crazy to think about, if this is Spot now, and this was the robot they were working on seven years ago, what does Spot look like in another... seven years?
Or what does Spot in 2030 look like? 2040? That's what's really exciting to me. And as it continues to get smarter and find new applications and accomplish new things, I can't help but feel a little bit proud of Spot and how far it's come. But it truly is dope tech because of its potential for the future.
And I'll certainly be keeping my eye out for it. So hey, no need to shut it down. Boston Dynamics, I like what I've seen.
so far that is so far anyway thanks for watching this entire video was edited by spot no i'm just kidding catch you guys in the next text video soon peace