Boston Dynamics says that it can build 1000 robot dogs a year by mid-2019

Boston Dynamics prepares to build its terrifying army of Robot dogs, according to a Saturday report in Inverse that the company has set a target date of July 2019 as the time that it will be ready to manufacture 1000 of its compact SpotMini models each year.

SpotMini is the smallest variant of Boston many different models of robo-dogs yet about two feet, nine inches tall. It weighs "about 66 pounds" and has an autonomy of an hour and a half, by TechCrunch, and the company has recently demonstrated all sorts of features like opening doors for other robots and robots. navigation skills increasingly complicated. Although the company has already announced its commercial launch in 2019 with a limited series of robots already in pre-production, the Inverse report presents new details, such as the SpotMini which is expected to become a kind of multi-platform Use: [19659005] The company's overall goal of 26 years is to become the Android operating system for phones: a versatile base for unlimited applications. Speaking last month at the CeBIT computer show in Hannover, Germany, [founder Marc Raibert] said that Boston Dynamics is already testing SpotMini with potential customers in four categories: construction, delivery, security and home [19659005] … "We built ten by hand, we build 100 with the manufacturers at the end of this year, and by the end of 2019 we will start production at the rate of about 1000 per year , "he said of SpotMini, whose prototype was sitting at his feet.

The point of attachment where SpotMini's robotic arm comes from his body and could in the future contain a variety of accessories "designed and produced by third parties", which would make it more versatile. For example, instead of a claw, the arm can end with a power tool or a camera.

However, as noted by Inverse, the company was criticized as a "curiosity of the technology industry" – especially at the time Google put it on the market. market open in 2016 before its eventual sale to Softbank Robotics in 2017. This includes claims its many viral videos show teleoperation rather than machine learning, that technology to make robots useful simply is not yet available or that the chances are long of making them economically profitable. (In 2015, the US military refused to buy a previous model called BigDog designed to carry ammunition or evacuate wounded troops, saying it was noisy enough to give the location of One unit.) SpotMini should turn in the tens of thousands of dollars

One possible use for robots is home delivery, where robots would at least theoretically face fewer regulatory hurdles than Amazon and UPS plans to deliver packages by unmanned aerial vehicle. But this approach creates its own problems, including that it should be cheaper than overworked humans, be able to navigate over obstacles that are not static like pedestrians, dogs and traffic intersections, and perhaps prepared the package away from the robot. Construction sites may be even more difficult to deploy safely for a human or a bot, since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration ranks construction among the most dangerous industries [19659009]. SpotMini, since all you really need to do is walk around, record things, and maybe detect and report anything that's going on weird. At a presentation of Softbank World in Tokyo in 2017, Raibert exhibited a model equipped with a camera.

Inverse has also theorized that the SpotMini or its possible successors could be used in the care of the elderly, In Japan, the elderly prepare robots to take care of them. they face a "deficit of 370,000 caregivers by 2025," according to The Guardian.

Because Spot Mini measures a little under three feet, it is objectively less scary and might even look cute if it cared for your aging grandmother – go get drinks and medications and open her up. doors.

The Japanese robots in question tend to be simpler assistive devices, such as machines that help get older people out of bed or smart mobility aids that automatically detect and compensate for inclines. And while SpotMini may look cute to pick up food or medicine, it's better not to pick the wrong ones, and be able to do it even if a random thing falls in front of a door.

In any case, the Boston Dynamics robot The Army may soon begin to break out of production lines, whether or not it has anything more useful to do than serve as status symbols for the ultra-rich corridors, or maybe doing backflips like his cousin ATLAS. Boston Dynamics for a comment, and we'll update that story if we hear back.

[Inverse]