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This stuff is not as mysterious as people seem to think. If BD robots were showing up in the military, they would be used in exercises. There would be soldiers

This stuff is not as mysterious as people seem to think. If BD robots were showing up in the military, they would be used in exercises. There would be soldiers and Marines who were training to use them. They wouldn't be invisible. This tech isn't like the stealth bomber, where the Air Force only needed a handful and could keep them out of the limelight. To be useful to the military, robots need to be deployed in war zones in significant numbers.

olivermarks 8y ago
Fair point, I bet there is extensive testing going on at this point though. There could be considerable competitive advantage to surprising an enemy with a new technology, even though the tech appears very immature today
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  > extensive testing going on at this point though. And that's where the money will come from. A dozen units here and there pays the bills when you're making super high margin stuff in barely higher than prototype volume.
Animats 8y ago
They tried. Boston Dynamics developed the Legged Squad Support System, a bigger, miltarized Big Dog, for DARPA and the USMC. It worked, and was field-tested at some Marine bases. There's video of this.[1] Troops said it was too noisy and not worth the hassle. DARPA dropped the project. There was supposed to be a subcontractor to build them a custom Diesel power pack, but that apparently didn't work out, and they had to go with the noisy gas engine version. It took about $120M to get to that point. Boston Dynamics was entirely a DoD contractor from the beginning to the Google buyout, and DARPA was very patient in funding them. I used to follow this stuff closely. Back in the 1990s I figured out how to do slip control for legged running across rough terrain, which requires something like "ABS for legs" to control slip. I have a patent on that, and that was used by the McGill legged robot in Canada. I was thinking high-end toys, like Aibo, or the humanoid Aibo that never came out as a product. But that market segment went nowhere. I could never see a business model for this. I met the designer of the Furby and found out what costs were like for that. No way were we going to get legged running down to toy pricing. Today, you could probably build a good running robot toy today for the $2K Sony is charging for their new Aibo, if you could sell a few hundred thousand. The compute power required isn't that high. Big Dog runs on a Pentium-class machine running QNX, with the balance servo loop running at 100Hz and the hydraulic valve control loops running at 1KHz. Batteries and motors are way ahead of where they were in the 1990s. Boston Dynamics' new smaller robots finally got rid of the hydraulics. All this is much easier to do than it used to be. When Google bought all those robotics companies, I thought big things were going to happen. Then we didn't hear anything for years. People in robotics thought they must have a big secret project underway. Turned out that Google had no clue what to do with all that robotics expertise. Maybe Softbank will come up with something. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY42w1w0TWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY42w1w0TWk
- olivermarks 8y ago
  thanks, very interesting!

olivermarks 8y ago

Fair point, I bet there is extensive testing going on at this point though. There could be considerable competitive advantage to surprising an enemy with a new technology, even though the tech appears very immature today

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
> extensive testing going on at this point though. And that's where the money will come from. A dozen units here and there pays the bills when you're making super high margin stuff in barely higher than prototype volume.

Animats 8y ago

They tried. Boston Dynamics developed the Legged Squad Support System, a bigger, miltarized Big Dog, for DARPA and the USMC. It worked, and was field-tested at some Marine bases. There's video of this.[1] Troops said it was too noisy and not worth the hassle. DARPA dropped the project. There was supposed to be a subcontractor to build them a custom Diesel power pack, but that apparently didn't work out, and they had to go with the noisy gas engine version. It took about $120M to get to that point. Boston Dynamics was entirely a DoD contractor from the beginning to the Google buyout, and DARPA was very patient in funding them. I used to follow this stuff closely. Back in the 1990s I figured out how to do slip control for legged running across rough terrain, which requires something like "ABS for legs" to control slip. I have a patent on that, and that was used by the McGill legged robot in Canada. I was thinking high-end toys, like Aibo, or the humanoid Aibo that never came out as a product. But that market segment went nowhere. I could never see a business model for this. I met the designer of the Furby and found out what costs were like for that. No way were we going to get legged running down to toy pricing. Today, you could probably build a good running robot toy today for the $2K Sony is charging for their new Aibo, if you could sell a few hundred thousand. The compute power required isn't that high. Big Dog runs on a Pentium-class machine running QNX, with the balance servo loop running at 100Hz and the hydraulic valve control loops running at 1KHz. Batteries and motors are way ahead of where they were in the 1990s. Boston Dynamics' new smaller robots finally got rid of the hydraulics. All this is much easier to do than it used to be. When Google bought all those robotics companies, I thought big things were going to happen. Then we didn't hear anything for years. People in robotics thought they must have a big secret project underway. Turned out that Google had no clue what to do with all that robotics expertise. Maybe Softbank will come up with something. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY42w1w0TWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY42w1w0TWk

olivermarks 8y ago
thanks, very interesting!