Seems to be a capital intensive business with no clear path to commercialization. The robots developed by ABB, KUKA, Mitsubishi and similars are very different

Seems to be a capital intensive business with no clear path to commercialization. The robots developed by ABB, KUKA, Mitsubishi and similars are very different to what Boston Dynamics is trying to build. These are impressive robots but their utilitarian value is too low. An industrial robot by ABB with a clear use case in a manufacturing process costs like $80k. An impressive toy robot with no clear use case like Boston Dynamics’ Spot also costs $80k. If these robots had a clear use case besides carrying heavy stuff, BD valuation would be 5X or 10X their current valuation. Of course the real value would be to use their research and know-how on these type of high-mobility/low foot-footprint robotics into actual industrial settings and use cases. Google didn’t have any internal use case for this tech and commercializing the technology as a vendor is way out of their competence and probably not enough value there to justify extra investment in sales, supply chain, etc. SoftBank was just doing what it has been doing for the last decade which is investing in shiny things. Hyundai may be the first owner to actually have a clear use case for this tech.