Boston Dynamics has been conducting some of the most public robotics research in the world as of the last few years. Im sure many recognize this 4-legged walking robot dog from videos on things like twitter and such, but its actually the real deal. For a mere $75,000, you can be the next owner of the Boston Dynamics Spot Robot Dog.
The company has recently delved into more commercial and private based researched involving robotics. Previously, most robotics research was done for private and military companies, without a lot of applicable use for smaller businesses and private homes, but Boston Dynamics hopes to change that, with Spot the dog being their first project in the space.
The technology this simple dog aims to develop are in the realm of motion and stability for moving robots. The dog has been designed to walk on surfaces of all types, slopes, and roughness. It can walk up a hill, over a pile of rocks, through a re-bar filled surface, all without getting tripped up, and rather quickly too. With this, we move towards a time where challenging or dangerous tasks that humans used to perform can now be done be robots that used to be otherwise impossible. Wheel and track based robotic systems didn’t give these older robots much mobility, making robotic solutions expensive and not very successful. Now however, I believe a whole new era of robotics has opened up, and im excited to see where it goes.
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-dog-now-available