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Late last night, Boston Dynamics released a new video of its robot dog, SpotMini, in action. He climbs stairs (no big deal, it's already done), and then walks down corridors, periodically extending his camera arm to inspect fragments of a construction site. Then he walks back a few steps and passes a door then …
Fade to black.
This is where, given the theatricality of almost every other Boston Dynamics video that preceded it, Spot should have done something right. Maybe fight a human to open a door. But no, just a nice fade to black. You see, all this time, we watched Party Spot having fun on the Internet. But this new spot is Business Square. Because Boston Dynamics is a business and Business Spot is its flagship product.
In May, the company announced that after all these videos, it finally put SpotMini on the market (not yet Atlas, his famous humanoid robot). It's an awesome quadruped, but the question is: What's SpotMini? good for?
When Boston Dynamics Director Marc Raibert announced the commercial launch of SpotMini, he announced that it would be bundled with packages. If you want Spot to act as a security guard, you must equip it with multiple cameras. Think of it as a car with options, but instead of adding rims, you add a snake-shaped arm that allows the robot to open those doors. So, given this new video, you can use Spot to analyze progress on a construction site. Everything is fine, but other companies specializing in robotics, like Doxel, are already doing the same.
SpotMini differs from other robots in its amazing mobility. This stems from more than two decades of Boston Dynamics research on both quadrupeds like Spot and bipeds like Atlas. But on a construction site, do you really need this, since a crawler robot can also tackle the stairs? Yes, perhaps, given how difficult it is to knock Spot on your feet – safety first and foremost on a construction site, after all. And if you had to equip Spot to work as a security guard, performing the rounds day and night, could he beat a robot like the Knightscope K5 rolling machine, which is already running at this rate?
We learned to love Party Spot. But in this new era of Business Spot, someone must go to work and make money at Boston Dynamics. Fortunately, we still have the antics of Atlas, the humanoid loving parkour, our favorite super senior. Who knows, maybe Spot will get too much and drop everything into a nasty video from time to time.
Good graduation, Spot Party. Pay attention to the foreman, however.
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